


The Flowers are Blooming

by kaliawai512



Series: It's Raining [8]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Brotherly Love, Child Death, Cinnamon Roll Papyrus, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Fluff, Gen, Goat Mom Is Best Mom, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Papyrus Knows More Than He Lets On, Papyrus Needs A Hug, Papyrus is a Good Brother, Protective Sans, Psychological Torture, Sans Doesn't Remember Resets, Sans Has Issues, Sans Needs A Hug, Sans loves his brother so much, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Unethical Experimentation, but he makes a lot of mistakes, in teeny tiny doses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-05-30 23:22:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 40,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15106913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaliawai512/pseuds/kaliawai512
Summary: Papyrus loves his brother more than anything in the world, and he knows that Sans loves him, too. Sans just doesn’t know him. And even after six years of living together in their new home, Papyrus isn’t sure he knows himself. But maybe there’s someone else who’s willing to try. Who’s willing to listen. Who’s willing to really see him, when no one else will.After all, who said a flower couldn’t be your friend?The second full-length story in theIt’s Rainingseries, and the sequel toIt’s Raining Right Here.ON INDEFINITE HIATUS.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So, since my schedule has been changing recently, I decided to change the posting date for this series. So have an early chapter!
> 
> This is the full-length sequel to _It's Raining Right Here_. It focuses a lot on Papyrus and Flowey, but Sans, Alphys and Toriel also play a major part, and Undyne pops up briefly, too. Due to the subject matter (time-hopping), the plot will be ... confusing. That's **intentional.** Just don't try too hard to keep track of things and you should be fine. ;)
> 
> Watch the tags. And the rating. I'll try to post major trigger warnings at the beginning of each chapter, but ... yeah. Stay safe, everyone. (As a note, I have never read _Flowey is Not a Good Life Coach_ \- because I don't have the guts - but I'm pretty darn sure this won't be that ... intense. But still, be careful.)
> 
> New chapters will be posted in Saturdays. Hope you all enjoy!

“Dr. Alphys?”

Alphys looked up from her desk, blinking, and turned around, before her mouth stretched into a wide smile at the sight of the familiar woman standing in the doorway to her office.

“Yes, Mrs. Snowdrake?”

Mrs. Snowdrake smiled back, a bit more hesitant, though still polite. She shifted her weight, as if nervous—she still hadn’t stepped fully into the office. Alphys didn’t think she ever had.

“Do you know when we’ll be going home? I … I can’t seem to remember how long I’ve been here, and I know my husband and son will be worried.”

Alphys stiffened for a second. Just a second, quick enough for her to hide. Then she smiled and held herself a little taller.

“D-don’t worry. I just need to run a few more t-tests, make sure you’re all d-doing okay, then we c-can get you back home to your family.”

She glanced down at her pocket, where she had stuffed her phone earlier, and debated taking it out. Then she looked back to Mrs. Snowdrake and offered one more smile.

“It s-shouldn’t be more than another day or two, I promise.”

Mrs. Snowdrake’s smile softened, a little wider, a little more genuine. She nodded.

“Wonderful.” She started to turn around, but paused, turning to face Alphys again with a gentle look on her face. “And thank you.”

Alphys’s brow furrowed. “F-for what?”

Mrs. Snowdrake just looked at her for a few seconds, her gaze gentle and far older than Alphys guessed she really was.

“For fixing us,” she replied. “My memory is still a little … fuzzy, but I remember not feeling well. I remember … falling down.”

Alphys clasped her hands together before she could stop herself, glancing to the side. Even in the silence, even without looking at her, Alphys swore she could still see Mrs. Snowdrake’s smile.

“If I’m still here now … you must have done something miraculous.”

Alphys hated it, but she could feel her chest swelling just a bit with the words. Her smile stretching a little wider. Mrs. Snowdrake chuckled, a soft, motherly chuckle that made Alphys wonder what she had been like with her family.

They had been crying so hard when they brought her in.

The teenager hadn’t even spoken.

The father had looked at her with pleading eyes, even though he couldn’t bring himself to say a word.

At the time, she had wanted to curl up into a ball in the corner and die. Because Mrs. Snowdrake wasn’t coming back. Her body, her _soul,_ would be used for important research, sure, but if they were still hoping that Alphys might be able to help …

She hadn’t had the nerve to tell them it wasn’t going to happen.

And now …

… would they think this was what she planned all along?

She gave Mrs. Snowdrake one more smile, shy but warm with pride, and Mrs. Snowdrake turned around and walked out of the room Alphys had been using as her office, probably to chat with the other monsters as she usually did. Alphys watched her go, letting her chest fill up with warmth and stay there, her smile stretching so wide across her face it almost made her glasses crooked.

Maybe she hadn’t been able to do what she hoped for. But all those monsters whose families thought they were going to die …

They were going to live. They were going to be okay. Because of _her._

That wasn’t too bad for her first big project as Royal Scientist, was it?

She turned back to her desk, her attention shifting to the left, where a small flowerpot sat near the corner. Right. There was that, too.

Well … it would have been nice if that part had worked, at least. Or if it had at least done _something,_ considering that she didn’t have any artificial souls to put in it, and now, likely never would. She still wasn’t sure how Asgore would have reacted, but he loved his flowers so much, and this flower was special to him. If she had been able to make it even _more_ special, if she had been able to use it to help get everyone out of here …

But this wasn’t the end. She would keep trying after this, even if this theory hadn’t turned out as she expected. She would figure something out. She would find a way to break the barrier, with or without the artificial souls.

And knowing Asgore … he would be happy with seeing these monsters alive and well, wouldn’t he?

She would tell him. Later today. She would call him and tell him what had happened.

He would be happy with her.

Even if she hadn’t succeeded … he would still be happy with what she had done.

Her smile had fallen, but now it stretched out again. Yes. He would be proud of her.

But first …

She turned back to the flower, then walked to the other side of the desk and picked it up.

It wasn’t going to be easy sneaking back into the castle garden to return it without anyone seeing, but if she had dug it up without anyone noticing the first time, she could put it back. It was a disappointment, for sure. But it might not have worked out anyway. The determination hadn’t notably affected it at all. And maybe it was better that she saved what remained of the determination for future experiments. Things that might actually turn out the way she wanted.

Alphys balanced the flowerpot with one arm while she picked up her bag with the other.

Return the flower, then come back here to make the phone call to Asgore, and more to the families. And tomorrow … she could start sending them all home. Even if the rest of this hadn’t turned out, seeing their smiles would make everything she had done more than worth it.

She smiled, stood up straight, and strolled out of her office.

Maybe it wasn’t what she had planned, but regardless, everything had turned out just fine. And that was good enough for now.

*

It was dark.

It hadn’t been dark before, had it?

It hadn’t been anything. When was the last time there had been something? What had that last something been? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t … he had been doing something. Something important. Something with …

He had been with Chara. They were … they were going to go to the surface, weren’t they? But … no, they had _reached_ the surface. They had reached the surface and he had brought their body all the way to the village.

And the humans saw him.

And they …

They were angry.

They saw Chara’s body, and they thought …

Asriel shuddered. He tried to wrap his arms around himself, but—

But—

Why couldn’t he move his arms?

Where … why couldn’t he feel his arms? Where were they? He wiggled from side to side, but he could hardly move, it was like he was tied up, except … he couldn’t feel any ties. He couldn’t feel his _arms,_ or his legs, or … something was wrong. Something was really, _really_ wrong and he didn’t know what, how had he gotten here, where was he, why couldn’t he move, why did he feel so … so thin, like his body had sucked up his arms and legs and now he was just one thin line, but that didn’t make sense, his whole body had turned to dust, it wouldn’t have just been his arms or his legs, and even if it had, it wouldn’t feel like _this_ except maybe it would he had always had all his limbs he didn’t know what it would feel like to lose them something was wrong everything was wrong and he just _—_

He opened his mouth. He still had a mouth, right? He could feel it, on his face, opening and closing. He breathed, he could still breathe, he tried to get out words but all that came out was a whimper.

He had …

… he had died.

He was dead.

The humans had … they killed him, and …

Was this death?

It was dark. It was so dark, he couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t _hear_ anything, it was … it was more than nothing, he wasn’t _aware_ of nothing, but he was aware of this, he turned his head—or what felt like his head—and all he could see was black, everywhere, silence, all around him. He was alone. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel, he couldn’t …

Was this what death was life?

If death was forever, if this was what it was, did that mean … was this where he was going to be forever?

Without Mom or … or Dad, or … Chara, or …

He was alone. He was completely alone.

He opened his mouth again, and this time, when he reached for his voice, it came.

“Mom?”

It wasn’t his voice. It was different, it was … high-pitched, and fake, and it didn’t sound anything like him but those were _his_ words. The sound echoed around him for a few seconds, then faded. Nothing.

“Mom?” he called again. “Dad? Chara?”

Silence. He never thought he could hate silence this much. He never thought silence could make him so _scared._ His breathing sped up, he jerked his head from side to side—it didn’t even feel like his _head_ anymore, and there were thin things like ears that _weren’t_ ears all around it—and he bit back tears even though he didn’t know if he could _cry_ anymore.

“Mommy!”

Nothing.

“Daddy!”

Silence.

 _“Somebody help me_!”

Darkness.

No tears formed in his eyes, but Asriel still felt the sobs bubbling up in a throat that wasn’t a throat. He was alone. He was going to be alone forever. He had gone along with Chara’s plan, he had agreed, he had _promised,_ but he had failed. He hadn’t listened. Chara had told him to fight, _begged_ him to fight, but he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to hurt anyone, the humans thought he had killed a little kid, they were just scared and angry, they weren’t evil, but—

But they killed him.

Just like Chara said they would.

And he hadn’t listened to them. He had let them attack, he had smiled and walked away and then he had died and now he was going to be here _forever_ and never see anyone he loved ever again. He had failed Chara. He had let them die for nothing. And now he was alone.

Forever.

Asriel sobbed and cried out for his mom, his dad, for his best friend. For somebody. For _anybody._ He screamed at the top of lungs that he didn’t even think existed.

But nobody came.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick notice that this story will be updating every _other_ Saturday, instead of every Saturday. Fact is, my schedule is just getting too busy with preparing for full-time work and my original writing to keep up my usual 1000 words per day (which is what allowed me to update weekly). So the next update will come on Saturday, July 21th. :)
> 
> As always, thanks, everyone, and hope you enjoy!
> 
> EDIT: Corrected the date of the next posting - sorry about that!

Papyrus was still at least fifty feet away from the sentry post, but he didn’t have to get any closer to see his brother’s skull clonked on the counter, his arms under his head as a makeshift pillow, snoozing the day away.

His browbone wrinkled, and he picked up his pace to something between a stroll and a jog, head held high, long legs stretching out each step as far as possible.

“SANS!”

Sans shifted and made a faint little grumbling noise, but didn’t open his eyes.

Papyrus huffed and walked faster.

“SANS! YOU LAZYBONES, WAKE UP ALREADY!”

This time, Sans didn’t even stir.

Papyrus gave in and ran the rest of the way, stopping right in front of the post and crossing his arms over his chest. He stared down at his brother, who looked even smaller than usual curled up against the table. For a second—a very short second—Papyrus considered that maybe he had actually been working very hard up until now, and perhaps, for once, he had actually earned a short break.

Then common sense kicked in, and Papyrus stomped his foot.

“SANS!”

Sans tilted his head ever-so-slightly in Papyrus’s direction, peeking open one socket just enough for Papyrus to be sure he had heard him. “yeah, bro?”

He didn’t even sound surprised. Of course, Papyrus woke him up from naps a lot, so maybe he had just gotten used to it.

Sans’s smile tilted into something that just barely looked like a smirk. Papyrus frowned.

Or maybe he had been faking it just to see how irritated Papyrus would get.

Again.

Papyrus groaned through clenched teeth and “HMPH”ed as he stood up straighter still.

“SOMETIMES I REALLY DON’T KNOW HOW UNDYNE HASN’T FIRED YOU YET, BROTHER. EVERY SINGLE TIME I COME TO YOUR STATION, YOU’RE EITHER DRINKING KETCHUP OR NAPPING! HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO KNOW IF A HUMAN COMES THROUGH HERE IF YOU’RE NEVER PAYING ATTENTION?”

Sans smiled a little wider, and Papyrus already knew what he was going to say before a single syllable left his mouth.

“oh, you know me. i got eyes in the back of my head. y’know, cause i don’t have any _in_ my head.”

Papyrus pressed his mouth into an even thinner line, his mastery of keeping a straight face hiding even the slightest bit of a smile that was most definitely not trying to break through. Then he groaned, crossing his arms over his chest and huffing.

“THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR JOKES, SANS!”

“it’s always the time for jokes, papyrus,” Sans retorted, settling his head further against his folded arms.

“AND IT’S NEVER THE TIME TO BE SO UNFORGIVABLY LAZY,” Papyrus shot back. “AND IF YOU HAVE TO MAKE SO MANY JOKES, YOU COULD AT LEAST MAKE BETTER ONES!”

“you love my jokes,” Sans said.

“I DO NOT!”

“do too.”

“DO NOT!”

“do not.”

“DO TOO— _SANS_! ”

Sans snickered, a slight, breathy sound. It wasn’t like a regular chuckle. It was tired and automatic, as if there was something he knew he should be laughing at but he couldn’t remember why it was funny. Papyrus tried to keep frowning, but the longer he looked at his brother’s face, the harder it was. When Sans looked away from him, staring off into the distance, his eyes drooping but not quite closed, Papyrus felt the last of the tension slip from his shoulders, and his last bit of resistance fade away.

“WELL,” he went on, his words like a sigh in and of themselves. He walked around to the back of Sans’s station. “I SUPPOSE THERE’S NOTHING TO BE DONE ABOUT YOU BEING LAZY ALL MORNING NOW. BUT ONCE YOU’VE HAD LUNCH, YOU’RE COMING RIGHT BACK HERE AND WATCHING FOR HUMANS LIKE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO.”

Sans didn’t resist as Papyrus slipped his hands under his arms and hoisted them up, balancing him against his chest. He curled up like a babybones, wrapping his arms around Papyrus’s neck and clinging as Papyrus adjusted him with almost instinctual ease.

“sure, bro,” he said. It sounded more like a yawn than a reply, and Papyrus wasn’t even sure if his brother had heard what he said.

He thought about pointing that out, but instead he just sighed, walked around the station, and started back down the path toward home.

Papyrus talked a bit more as they walked, telling Sans about how his day had gone so far and how productive he had been. He still hoped that hearing about his own productivity would inspire his brother to emulate him. It hadn’t worked so far, but Papyrus wasn’t going to give up easily.

He was fairly sure Sans was listening. Even if he pretended not to. Even if, every time he glanced down, he found Sans’s eyesockets shut, his breathing slow, as if he had already fallen asleep.

Sans might be able to fool him from a distance—barely!—but he certainly wasn’t going to fool the Great Papyrus when he was riding in his arms.

So Papyrus kept talking, and walking, and Sans kept pretending to sleep. Papyrus looked around at his puzzles as he passed them, making note of which ones needed to be recalibrated—and making sure to remind Sans that his hadn’t been recalibrated in far, far too long, and he really needed to get on that. Sans didn’t respond, of course, but Papyrus was fairly sure he heard him. Even if he knew there was little chance of him doing anything about it.

After a while, Papyrus let the silence fall once again. Silence was odd, and usually he wasn’t very fond of it, but sometimes it was nice. Sometimes it was just a little refreshing to be with his brother without saying anything. It was familiar, in a way he didn’t understand. He had never asked Sans about it. Maybe he should.

But not today.

Today, after the silence had remained unbroken—even by a pun—for more than a minute, Papyrus looked down at Sans, lounging in his arms, and tilted his head to get a clear view of his face.

His eyes were open again, though still hanging half-shut. His head had turned to the side so he was staring off into the distance—in this case, the line of the forest—and the lights had completely disappeared from his sockets. Papyrus pursed his mouth into a thin line, pushing away the ache in his chest by standing up a little taller and forcing another smile.

“UNDYNE TAUGHT ME A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR MAKING PASTA SAUCE,” he announced, and in under a second, the lights in Sans’s eyes were back, and his head tilted up in that lazy way that almost made Papyrus believe he had just imagined the empty expression moments before. He smiled wider. “OUR LAST BATCH TURNED OUT MARVELOUSLY! I’LL MAKE IT FOR YOU FOR LUNCH!”

Sans’s permanent smile tilted into a smirk again, and Papyrus wasn’t sure whether to be indignant at the joke he could already hear coming out of his brother’s mouth, or happy that the smirk, at least, was real.

“you sure you’re up for repairing the kitchen again?”

Indignation shoved aside the happiness like Undyne kicking a boulder out of her walking back.

“THAT WAS ONE TIME! AND THE KITCHEN LOOKS EVEN BETTER WITH THE NEW SINK!”

“you made it too tall for me to reach, though,” Sans added, smirking wider.

Papyrus huffed. “IT HASN’T STOPPED YOU FROM REACHING IT! YOU GET UP THERE, EVEN IF I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU’RE DOING IT!”

Sans chuckled, but said nothing else.

Papyrus refused to look at him after that, but he couldn’t help but replay the chuckle over and over a few times in his head, trying to memorize what it sounded like.

Sans smiled a lot. He laughed a lot. But fake smiles didn’t look the same as real smiles. And Papyrus knew his brother far too well to be convinced by a fake smile.

Even if everyone else was.

Speaking of everyone else …

“HELLO!” Papyrus called as he stepped past the Snowdin sign and toward the line of shops, where several monsters were chatting. He smiled even wider than usual and picked up his pace, tightening his grip on Sans so as not to jostle him.

The monsters looked up. One of them smiled, though less widely, and gave a quick wave.

“Hey, Papyrus. Hey, Sans.”

Sans tilted his head very slightly in the monster’s direction and lifted his hand in something that was probably meant to be a wave. Immediately, all three of the monsters waved back. Papyrus kept himself from frowning.

He had never seen his brother talk to these monsters before. But his brother talked to a lot of people.

Or … he spent time around a lot of people. Even if he wasn’t talking to them.

Everyone knew him. Everyone liked him.

Even if they couldn’t tell the difference between his smiles.

Sometimes Sans didn’t make sense. Well, really, Sans _rarely_ made sense, but this was one particular area in which he made even less sense than usual. Because Papyrus had always thought that working very hard and smiling and talking was how you got things done. It was how you got the jobs you wanted. It was how you made friends. But Sans … none of that seemed to apply to him.

He never did any work, but he hadn’t gotten fired. Undyne even seemed … “impressed”? In a weird sort of way. Impressed that he could do so little work, but never slack off enough for her to justify kicking him out of the job. Papyrus was fairly sure he did other things here and there—didn’t he say something about a hot dog stand the other day?—but he had still kept his place as a sentry for the past six years, and even added another two sentry jobs in Waterfall and Hotland.

He didn’t try to make friends, but he _had_ friends. Or … he had people who liked him. That was what a friend was, wasn’t it?

They laughed at Sans’s jokes. And they laughed when he put whoopee cushions on chairs and in his palm when he shook people’s hands. Did they like him because of the pranks? Did they like him because he made terrible jokes?

Would they like Papyrus if he made terrible jokes?

But—no. Papyrus had integrity. He wasn’t going to make terrible jokes just so he could have a few more friends. He was fine the way he was. He was more than fine, he was amazing! Just the way he was.

That was what Sans told him, sometimes, when they were at home and nothing was going on and Sans was falling asleep on the couch. Even when he was half-asleep, he always said it like it was the most important thing in the world.

Papyrus balanced Sans on one arm as he opened the front door to their house, walking inside and plopping his brother down on the couch as he made his way into the kitchen. He could feel Sans looking over the arm of the couch to watch him, but he ignored the temptation to look back. Sans always watched him when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes Papyrus wanted to ask him what he was looking for, and whether he ever found it.

Ten minutes later, the spaghetti was boiling in the pot. Well, technically it was _smoking_ in the pot, but the smoke alarm hadn’t gone off yet and he had it quite under control, thank you very much. He waited until it was nice and dark brown and the water was gone, then he dumped the ingredients for the sauce in and mashed them up until it was as mixed as possible. He wasn’t sure whether the noodles were supposed to be all crunchy like that, but … that added texture, didn’t it? That was what Undyne told him. Her spaghetti always had the best texture. She said that if it didn’t feel like it was going to break your teeth, then it was still too raw.

When he checked, he found Sans watching him from the couch, like he always did. He pretended not to notice, and plated up the spaghetti, setting it on the table and decorating it with some sprigs of a plant he didn’t know the name of and a few shavings of chocolate, because Sans liked chocolate, didn’t he? He had been the one to buy it from the store, at the same time as he bought all those other baking supplies a few weeks ago. Papyrus still didn’t know what he planned to make with it.

Once the spaghetti looked just as amazing as he had imagined it, he turned around to face the living room, smiling wide, and opened his mouth to announce lunch.

But before he could get out a word, Sans sunk a little further into the couch and shook his head.

“thanks, bro, but i already ate.”

Papyrus paused, frozen. He blinked. Then his mouth clamped shut.

“WHAT?” he asked, his hands finding their way to his hips. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

“i had grillby’s for brunch.”

A very small part of Papyrus, a part that he kept buried deep inside him, sunk, as the words that he had heard at least twenty times settled into his head.

Then he shoved that part away and groaned.

“UGH! THAT GREASE TRAP IS NOT FOOD! YOU NEED PROPER NUTRITION, SANS!”

Sans chuckled.

“don’t worry. i always make sure to _ketchup_ on my nutrition from time to time.”

Papyrus turned away as he screeched and stomped his foot, but he could still see Sans smiling out of the corner of his eye.

It was one of those smiles that looked both happy and sad all at once, and even though Papyrus didn’t want his brother to be sad, it was the realest smile he had seen on his face all day.

He gave Sans a good long lecture about the importance of proper health as he scraped all the spaghetti into plastic containers and stuck them in the fridge. Sans smiled the whole time, just a little bit wider than the smile permanently stuck on his face. Papyrus wished he could take a picture of it, so he could prove to Sans that this was what his smile should look like, when he claimed that _of course he was smiling, bro, he was always smiling._

He liked to do that: say things that were kind of true, but not really true. And it was very, very hard for Papyrus to tell him he was doing it, when Papyrus knew that not telling the whole truth made his brother a little less sad.

It was worth it, though, when that slightly-more-real smile remained on his face even as they headed out of the house, back toward their stations.

Sans actually walked with him, for once. He never seemed to walk very much nowadays. He was always finding what he called “shortcuts,” even though Papyrus had tried following him and had yet to figure out where he was going when he took one. Perhaps he had discovered a secret underground tunnel system and didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

It sounded silly that he wouldn’t want to share a secret underground tunnel system with his brother, but maybe he was jealous that Papyrus moved around a lot more than he did and the secret underground tunnel system made him feel more adequate.

Or maybe he just didn’t want to tell anybody.

There were a lot of things Sans didn’t want to tell anybody.

So Papyrus didn’t ask.

They chatted as they walked—or, well, Papyrus chatted, and Sans listened and nodded and occasionally made bad puns. They passed by some of the same monsters, who greeted them as before. They walked through the snowy area outside of Snowdin, greeting the Guard members that Papyrus couldn’t help but watch with a mixture of disapproval and envy—they hardly got anything done, but _they_ were members of the Royal Guard, so certainly he should be, too, right?

Sans watched him out of the corner of his eye, and as usual, Papyrus pretended not to notice.

At last, Papyrus stopped at the new guard post he had put together last week, crossing his arms over his chest as he stared down at Sans, standing in front of him with his hands tucked into his pockets.

“YOU’LL GO RIGHT BACK TO YOUR POST.”

“yup.”

“AND YOU’RE GOING TO STAND THERE AND WATCH FOR HUMANS JUST LIKE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO.”

“sure.”

“AND YOU’RE GOING TO KEEP DOING YOUR JOB UNTIL YOUR SHIFT IS OVER AND IT’S TIME TO COME HOME.”

“uh-huh.”

Papyrus gave his brother a long, skeptical look, then nodded. “GOOD.”

“and you’re gonna spend the rest of the afternoon rearranging puzzles to look like your face.”

“EXACTLY! I—SANS!”

Sans chuckled as Papyrus stomped his foot, and when he turned to face him, his smile was wide and as real as Papyrus had seen it all day, his sockets crinkled, wide lights shining in the middle.

Why did he only smile like that when Papyrus wanted to shout at him?

“just kidding, bro,” he said. “your puzzles are as cool as you are. who else thinks to make their puzzles look like them? it’s a built-in signature.”

Papyrus softened a bit, and his smile grew. “IT IS!”

Sans chuckled again, but this time, just nodded.

He waved once as he headed off toward his station, and Papyrus watched him for a minute before turning on his own way. He paused a few seconds later, turning around, ready to remind his brother that ketchup was not an acceptable afternoon snack, but Sans was already gone.

Not further down the path. Not turned around any corners—there _weren’t_ any corners.

He was just … gone.

Papyrus really needed to ask him how he did that one of these days.

But for now, he just shook his head at his brother’s antics, turned back around, and started toward his latest puzzle. It had been sitting there for three days, after all, and it could use a bit of improvement.

Maybe he would make this one look like Sans’s face. Just to shake things up a bit.

He walked for a good few minutes, taking long strides and humming as he looked around. Snow to the left, snow to the right, snow in front of him, and snow behind him. There wasn’t much variety around here, but it would make it much easier to see a human when one finally showed up.

Probably.

Humans weren’t totally white like him and Sans, were they?

Well. Even if they were, Papyrus was an expert at Sans-spotting, which meant he would be an expert in human-spotting as well. Hopefully his brother would actually do his job for once and keep an eye out for one, but on the chance—the very high chance—that it made it past him, it would never get past Papyrus.

He would capture one.

Then Undyne would be proud of him. Then _everyone_ would be proud of him. They would know exactly how great he was, how great Sans said he had always been.

They would all want to be his friend.

And he wouldn’t even have to make a single terrible joke.

Papyrus smiled, held himself tall, and walked a little faster.

Then something caught the corner of his eye, and he stopped and turned his head.

For a second, he thought it might actually be a human. But he was fairly sure humans weren’t that small, and he thought they were a good deal thicker than that, too. Then his eyes focused on the shape of it, the very familiar shape of it, and even as he felt a tinge of disappointment at not finding a human, curiosity quickly took its place.

It was … a flower.

A yellow flower, poking out of the snow maybe ten yards away.

Papyrus had never seen a yellow flower around here before. He had seen flowers in Waterfall, of course, whenever he went to visit Undyne, but he had never seen a yellow one. Most of them were echo flowers, and those were definitely blue. Sans liked to prank people with them. Especially by making farting noises into them then hiding until someone walked by and a flower served as a whoopee cushion. Papyrus, of course, only used them for practical reasons, like leaving messages for Undyne in a secret code they had made up last month as part of his training.

She still hadn’t told him what secret codes were used for in combat, but she had insisted it was far more important than attack strategies, and she hadn’t gotten to be Captain of the Royal Guard for nothing.

But this definitely wasn’t an echo flower. Echo flowers weren’t yellow.

Echo flowers didn’t have faces.

Echo flowers didn’t look … upset.

At least … none of the ones _he_ had met looked upset.

Maybe this one had had a bad day?

It was staring at the ground with an expression on its face—yes, it had eyes and a mouth, and he _knew_ the echo flowers didn’t have that—that reminded him a little of Sans when he thought Papyrus wasn’t looking. Like he was thinking about something very serious, and very important, and very uncomfortable, even though he never said what it was.

Sans rarely got any better if Papyrus left him alone. He had tried, and it didn’t work. Sans just got worse. Or he noticed Papyrus was there, and even though nothing had changed, he smiled that smile everyone but Papyrus believed and pretended that everything was alright.

If this flower was like Sans …

Papyrus took a deep breath, held himself up all, and strode forward.

“HELLO, LITTLE FLOWER!”

The flower straightened—Papyrus had never seen a flower that could move its stem like that—and turned to face him. It blinked—Papyrus didn’t know flowers could blink. It stared for a few seconds. Then it seemed to soften, as if it had realized that Papyrus really was talking to it. Maybe it had heard of him. Maybe it had heard grow great he was and was happy that he was here.

It _did_ look a little happier.

It glanced away, like it was shy. “… hello.”

It had a funny voice. Not a bad voice, but not anything like what Papyrus had heard before. Maybe that was what all flowers would sound like, if they could talk. And weren’t echo flowers.

Papyrus walked a little closer, until he stood only a few yards away.

“I AM THE GREAT PAPYRUS,” he said. “PERHAPS YOU’VE HEARD OF ME. I AM GOING TO BE A VERY FAMOUS MEMBER OF THE ROYAL GUARD SOON!”

The flower gave him a funny look, like it was confused, but a second later it smiled. A small, soft smile that didn’t look much like Sans’s. But it was still nice.

“Neato.”

Papyrus beamed. “IT IS INDEED NEATO!”

The flower kept looking at him, kept smiling that small smile, but didn’t say anything else.

Papyrus stepped a little closer. “I’VE NEVER SEEN YOU AROUND HERE BEFORE. IS THIS YOUR FIRST TIME IN SNOWDIN?”

The flower opened its mouth and started to say something, then stopped and looked down at the ground, like it was thinking about something important. Something confusing. It nodded without meeting his eyes.

“Uh-huh.”

It sounded like a he. Papyrus wasn’t sure why, he had heard people who were called “he” have all kinds of voices. But he got the very strong feeling this flower was a “he.”

“WELL, THEN, I SHALL BE THE FIRST TO WELCOME YOU TO SNOWDIN,” Papyrus went on. “YOU’LL FIND I AM QUITE THE EXPERT OF THE LOCAL ATTRACTIONS. I WOULD BE HAPPY TO GIVE YOU A TOUR SOMETIME. I CAN SHOW YOU THE LIBRARBY OR THE SHOP OR THE INN OR THE GREASY BAR MY BROTHER HANGS OUT IN OR EVEN THE VERY SCENIC MY HOUSE.”

The flower made a sound a little like a chuckle. Papyrus wasn’t sure what was so funny, but it was nice to hear the flower laugh. It didn’t sound so upset when it laughed.

“OH!” he added after a second’s pause. “I ALMOST FORGOT TO ASK WHAT YOUR NAME IS. IF I AM GOING TO SHOW YOU AROUND TOWN, I SHOULD AT LEAST KNOW YOUR NAME!”

The flower paused for a few seconds, as if Papyrus had asked it something strange. Maybe it _was_ strange for flowers, to be asked their name. Papyrus had never asked a flower its name before. Maybe he should start. Maybe there were a lot of other flowers that could talk to him if he just gave them a chance.

He watched the flower, and slowly, the flower looked back up at him, some of the uncertainty on its face slipping away. It looked at him, searching his face for something, but before Papyrus could figure out what it was, the flower apparently found it. Its face softened.

“Flowey,” he said, stretching up a little taller, his smile a little wider, so that it almost looked like Sans when he smiled for real.

“FLOWEY!” Papyrus repeated. “THAT IS AN EXCELLENT NAME! FLOWEY THE FLOWER! IT IS VERY NICE TO MEET YOU, FLOWEY THE FLOWER!”

The flower looked at him, not saying anything. Papyrus kept smiling, kept holding himself tall and proud, because that was what you were supposed to do when you made friends, wasn’t it? That was what Undyne had told him. Be yourself. Be _proud_ to be yourself. Be proud to be yourself, exactly as you are, and you’ll find people who will appreciate exactly how great you are right now.

And just as Papyrus’s shoulders were beginning to fall, Flowey smiled wider still, his eyes—even though they were little more than dots—bright and his stem straight and strong.

“Yeah, Papyrus. Nice to meet you, too.”


	3. Chapter 2

It was very, very rare that Papyrus was in a rush to finish his work.

He was always _quick,_ of course. He was very talented, and very great, and he was good enough at what he did to do it with haste. But he didn’t _rush._ He wasn’t going to move so fast as to risk allowing any of his work to be anything less than perfect.

But today, he rushed so much that he had to go back and correct one of his puzzles three times, always because of a silly mistake.

Which just made him want to rush more, and take up more time correcting mistakes.

Really, there was no logical reason to rush when it just made him later, but he couldn’t help himself. He had something very important to do at four o’clock, after all, and the Great Papyrus wasn’t going to be late for something this important.

He finished working on his last puzzle with five minutes to spare, and spent those last five minutes running as fast as his legs would carry him toward the spot he had decided on yesterday. Or, rather, the spot his new friend had decided. Papyrus would have thought that flowers would be stuck in the same place all the time, and it would only be courteous for him to do the walking when his new friend could not, but Flowey had insisted that this new spot would be best. Papyrus was confused, but he hadn’t protested.

And to his pleasant surprise, when the spot came into sight, he could just make out the yellow and green shape poking up out of the snow.

He waved and beamed even as he sprinted, and Flowey, as far away as he still was, looked up and smiled.

“YOU REALLY CAN MOVE!” Papyrus called as he stumbled to a—very graceful—stop a few feet in front of the flower, close enough to be friendly but not so close as to make Flowey feel even smaller than he already was.

Flowey giggled. “I told you I could! Wanna see?”

Papyrus didn’t know he could smile any wider than he already was.

“OH YES!”

It was difficult to read the expressions on Flowey’s face, so different from the other faces Papyrus had seen, but if he could read Sans’s face when he was always smiling, he could read a flower’s face when he had never seen a flower with a face at all.

And he was absolutely sure that Flowey looked delighted.

Then, without another word, he shot down into the ground and disappeared from sight.

Papyrus stiffened, sockets wide. Was that meant to happen? Was Flowey alright? Papyrus had never heard of someone disappearing into the ground before. Could Flowey breathe down there? Did flowers need to breathe? Did he—

Then Papyrus heard a _pop_ a few feet behind him, and he spun around to find Flowey looking up at him, grinning even wider than before.

Papyrus’s jaw fell.

“WOWIE!” he all but squealed, jumping up and down and applauding. “THAT WAS AMAZING! CAN YOU SHOW ME AGAIN?”

“Sure!” Flowey replied, giggling again. He paused, as if to make sure Papyrus was watching, before he disappeared into the ground again. This time it was only a second before he popped back up a few feet away, watching with wide, eager eyes, like a small child who had just shown a friend a new trick.

A very cool new trick.

“THAT’S _NEAT_! ” Papyrus replied, clapping once more. “CAN YOU TEACH ME HOW TO DO THAT?”

Flowey got a funny expression on his face then, but it was gone before Papyrus had the chance to read it.

“I … don’t think other monsters can do it,” he said, a little sheepish. “At least, I don’t think so. I’ve never met one that can.”

“OH.” Papyrus deflated a little. It would have been fun to pop in and out of the ground like that. Maybe it would even be better than Sans’s shortcuts. But he was back to smiling a second later, looking down at his new friend with pride. “WELL, THEN, YOU MUST BE VERY SKILLED, TO DO A NEAT TRICK LIKE THAT!”

Flowey stared for a moment, as if he wasn’t quite sure what Papyrus had said. Then he lowered his head, a shy, twitching smile on his face. Flowers couldn’t blush, but Flowey didn’t need to. Papyrus beamed.

He sat down in the snow after that, right in front of Flowey, so that they were a little closer to the same height. His pants would be wet, but he didn’t mind. It was laundry day tomorrow, and Sans had an awful lot of dirty laundry for him to get clean, so he could just throw these in, too.

At first, Papyrus did most of the talking, but after a few minutes, Flowey responded to his nudging and talked a little more. About his trick, mostly. Papyrus tried to ask him about himself, but Flowey always changed the subject. He was a lot like Sans in that way. But Papyrus wasn’t going to push too hard, and besides, he always loved telling new people about himself.

“You said you were going to be a very famous member of the Royal Guard?” Flowey asked after about ten minutes. “Are you a Royal Guardsperson?”

Papyrus puffed up a little. “YES! WELL … NOT QUITE. NOT YET. BUT I’M IN TRAINING, AND SOON THE CAPTAIN WILL FINISH MY TRAINING AND LET ME IN AND THEN I’M SURE I WILL BE VERY FAMOUS! ALL I HAVE TO DO IS CAPTURE A HUMAN AND THAT WILL BE MY FAST TRACK TO THE BIG SHOTS!”

Flowey got a funny look on his face again. “Capture a human?”

“YES! THAT IS WHAT UNDYNE SAID IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A ROYAL GUARDSPERSON CAN DO. THE KING WANTS TO CAPTURE A HUMAN SO THAT HE CAN BREAK THE BARRIER WITH SOUL POWER! I DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW THAT WORKS, BUT I KNOW THAT CAPTURING A HUMAN IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT.”

Flowey didn’t say anything. For a second, he looked mad, then he looked sad, then he looked … unsure.

Before Papyrus could ask him what was wrong, Flowey asked, “So you know the Captain?”

And immediately, all the questions lingering in Papyrus’s head disappeared, replaced by a wide, proud grin.

“INDEED I DO! HER NAME IS UNDYNE, CAPTAIN OF THE ROYAL GUARD, AND SHE IS MY BEST FRIEND! AND MY BOSS. BUT SHE SAYS THAT WE CAN STILL BE FRIENDS EVEN THOUGH SHE’S MY BOSS!”

“Oh,” Flowey said. That was all he said.

A few seconds passed where neither of them said anything. Flowey didn’t move. Papyrus furrowed his browbone in thought, then straightened up.

“I SHOULD INTRODUCE YOU TO HER! I THINK YOU TWO WOULD GET ALONG VERY WELL!”

Probably. Papyrus wasn’t sure if Undyne would like a talking flower. She seemed very fond of the plants in Waterfall, and went out of her way not to harm them, even if she was training. Did that mean she would like all types of flowers? Or maybe she wouldn’t like that the flowers actually said things that weren’t just repeated, like the echo flowers?

“I’ve … already met her, actually,” Flowey said, snapping Papyrus’s attention back to him.

Papyrus perked up. “OH! THAT’S EVEN BETTER! WE CAN GO HANG OUT TOGETHER, THE THREE OF US! IT WOULD BE SO MUCH FUN!”

But Flowey didn’t smile. He looked to his left, then to his right, then cleared his throat, even though he didn’t really have a throat to clear.

“I, um … I don’t think she’d remember me.”

Papyrus tilted his head, ready to ask what he meant by that, but before he could open his mouth, Flowey looked up again.

“You said you’re in training?”

“I AM!” Papyrus replied, even though part of him still wanted to know why Flowey had looked so uncomfortable. “SHE SAYS I AM AN AMAZING STUDENT! SUCH AN AMAZING STUDENT THAT SHE HAS BEGUN TEACHING ME HOW TO COOK! APPARENTLY THAT IS AN ESSENTIAL SKILL FOR A ROYAL GUARDSPERSON.”

“So … you don’t learn how to fight?” Flowey asked.

“OF COURSE I DO!”

The words fell out before Papyrus could even think about them, and he stood there afterward, staring at Flowey as Flowey stared back at him. Then he cleared his throat and looked away.

“OR … I DID,” he added, a little more quietly. “I LEARNED HOW TO FIGHT BEFORE. I TRAINED A LOT! I TRAINED FOR YEARS!

Flowey tilted his head. “But you still need more training?”

Papyrus did his best not to fidget, and stood up taller still.

“UNDYNE SAYS THAT I AM ALMOST READY! I JUST NEED TO LEARN A LITTLE MORE!”

“Cooking or fighting?”

“BOTH!” His voice squeaked a little, and he cleared his throat again to smooth it out. “A ROYAL GUARD MUST BE VERY WELL-ROUNDED!”

“Right,” Flowey said. He looked away, and Papyrus kept himself from fidgeting again. After a few long seconds, Flowey looked back to him, hesitant, but curious. “Hey, uh … Papyrus … I could teach you how to fight. If you wanted.”

Papyrus blinked.

“YOU?” he asked. His browbone furrowed. “I DIDN’T KNOW FLOWERS COULD FIGHT. HOW DO YOU POUND YOUR ENEMIES INTO THE GROUND IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANY ARMS? DO YOU USE YOUR FACE?”

Flowey laughed. He had a very high-pitched voice. It sounded like a little kid’s, actually.

“No, silly, I use my attacks, just like you! See?”

Before Papyrus could say anything else, several small white … things, not even the size of grapes, popped up all around Flowey’s head. They circled him, floating around like they had wings. It looked pretty neat, actually.

“OH,” Papyrus said. “THOSE … DON’T LOOK VERY STRONG.”

Flowey frowned. He didn’t have lips, but Papyrus knew you didn’t need lips to pout. “They’re a lot stronger than they look.”

“SO THEY ARE SLIGHTLY STRONGER THAN VERY WEAK—OW!”

Papyrus hadn’t even closed his mouth before something smacked into the side of his head, hard enough for the sound to echo around his skull, hard enough for him to feel his HP drop a good 5 points. He stumbled a little from the shock of it, and by the time he looked up, Flowey was already staring at him with wide, horrified eyes, like a small child that had just done something he knew was very, very bad.

“S-sorry!” he squeaked out, and he sounded even more like a small child now. “Sorry, I … I just …”

He trailed off, but Papyrus’s mouth was already stretching into a beaming grin.

“WOWIE! YOU ARE MUCH STRONGER THAN VERY WEAK, FLOWEY! UNDYNE WOULD BE VERY IMPRESSED”

He expected Flowey to look flattered—Undyne being impressed was a very big compliment—but Flowey just looked … uncomfortable. His cheeks went pink—but he didn’t have cheeks, did he?—and he looked away, chuckling in a way that did not sound like he was laughing.

“Y-yeah …” he muttered, as if he were talking as much to himself as to Papyrus. He waited a few seconds, then looked back up. “So … what do you say? Wanna train together?”

Papyrus smiled even wider.

“THE GREAT PAPYRUS WOULD LOVE TO TRAIN WITH YOU! I CAN LEARN NEW TECHNIQUES AND YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING UNDYNE HAS TAUGHT ME!”

Flowey smiled back. It was a small smile, like he was still worried about something, but it was wider than before, and even though Flowey’s eyes weren’t like any eyes Papyrus had ever seen, he swore he could still see them shining.

“Sounds good.”


	4. Chapter 3

Something was wrong.

It wasn’t the normal sort of “something’s wrong” feeling that Sans got if Papyrus was late for dinner—not that he ever was—or he said something that made sense in just the wrong way—which he did all the time. Something was wrong, and Sans had absolutely no idea what it was.

Except he did. Because it was familiar.

But he didn’t have a name for it, and he couldn’t pick out exactly what was so familiar about it.

And it wasn’t like there was any way for him to find out.

So he didn’t think about it. At least, he tried not to think about it. There was no point thinking about something he could do nothing about, right? It would just cause him more stress, and Papyrus always seemed to notice when he was stressed, and that made him stressed, which made Sans more stressed, and, well, Sans had learned a long time ago that nothing would come of it.

There was nothing for him to talk about. No one to talk about it with. No one to help him solve the problem, and no way for him to solve the problem himself if he didn’t even know what it was.

So he let it go.

Or, well … he tried.

But it was a whole lot harder to let go of something once you realized exactly how worrying it was.

Papyrus hadn’t checked on him at his station today. Not even once. He might have come by when Sans was at one of his other jobs, of course, but he always left a note if he did that, and there was definitely no note when he got back. They had seen each other that morning, and over lunch, but other than that, Sans hadn’t seen his brother all day. Which was weird. They were stationed fairly close together, and even though Sans knew Papyrus liked to walk around and “patrol” the area, and make sure his puzzles were set in case of a human’s arrival, he usually came by at least once every couple of hours to make sure Sans wasn’t sleeping.

But today, nothing.

Of course, he had a weird shift today. He hadn’t worked at all during the morning—his hot dog stand brought it a lot more cash that time of day, and they needed it—and he had planned to take on hours in the evening to make up for it. Even if he ended up spending all of those hours at the door, at least he could still put it on his timesheet. Undyne had yet to catch him slacking off, and after six years, he doubted she ever would.

Even still, Papyrus made sure to track him down, no matter which of his stations he was at—and considering that his hot dog station was technically _at_ his Hotland station, Papyrus still could have checked on him then.

But he hadn’t.

Sans had gotten home a little after five, and found the house empty. That wasn’t too unusual—sometimes Papyrus trained with Undyne in the late afternoons, or decided to do one more check of all his puzzles. Still, it would have been nice to see his brother there, safe and sound, doing something ordinary, if only to make the rest of the day feel less … weird.

So Sans sat on the couch and waited. He watched the clock on the wall tick by each minute, and ran through everything that could have occupied his brother that day. Everything he could be doing. Everything that could have kept him from checking in.

More than half of the possibilities weren’t ones he wanted to linger on.

It was almost six, and Sans had ran through almost two hundred possibilities, when the door swung open, and Papyrus strode in like an actor walking onto a stage, hands on his hips, head held high, as if there was a crowd there applauding his arrival.

There should have been. But there was just Sans.

“HELLO, BROTHER! I HAVE RETURNED!” Papyrus announced, his pride mixing with disapproval at Sans lounging on the couch.

Sans flashed him a grin that almost hid his relief and lifted one hand in a lazy wave.

“hey.”

Papyrus looked at him for a moment, then behind him. He crossed the living room with long strides until he reached the kitchen. Then he turned back to Sans with a furrowed browbone and a deep frown.

“SANS!” he called, loud enough for Sans to hear him across the house, even though he was only a couple of yards away. “I ASKED YOU THIS MORNING TO GET DINNER STARTED!”

“i did,” Sans replied, making an even vaguer motion back toward the kitchen.

Papyrus looked unimpressed.

“TAKING FROZEN DINNERS OUT OF THE FREEZER TO LET THEM THAW DOES NOT COUNT AS STARTING DINNER!”

“sure it does,” Sans said, smiling wider and tilting his head in what he thought counted as an innocent look. “now you don’t have to cook them as long.”

Papyrus’s face twisted into something that Sans really wished he could have taken a picture of. He struggled with words for a few seconds, as if he couldn’t figure out what to say, before he finally stomped his foot and shook his head. “UGH! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SOMETIMES. FROZEN DINNERS ARE NOT REAL FOOD!”

“so they’re plastic food?”

“NO! WELL, MAYBE! I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE MADE OF, BUT IT’S NOT GOOD FOR YOU, SO YOU SHOULDN’T EAT IT!” Sans had nothing to say to that. Papyrus waited for him to speak, but Sans just looked at him, smiling, his head still tilted to the side. At last, Papyrus huffed a long, heavy breath and turned back toward the kitchen. “I SUPPOSE THERE’S NOTHING TO BE DONE FOR IT NOW. I WILL MAKE SOMETHING.”

Sans pushed himself up a little from the arm of the couch. “no need, bro. i got my plastic dinner—”

“AUGH!”

“—and you can have the rest of the quiche i made a couple days ago.”

Papyrus paused, his mouth still open. It took a few seconds for Sans’s words to process, and when they did, he closed his mouth, turning away with a thoughtful look on his face.

“HM.” He glanced at Sans out of the corner of his eye, then at the kitchen again. “WELL, REHEATED FOOD IS NOT NEARLY AS GOOD AS FRESH FOOD, BUT I SUPPOSE IT IS BETTER THAN FROZEN DINNERS. AND IT IS RATHER LATE TO START A MEAL …”

Sans chuckled and hoisted himself off the couch, standing on wobbly, tired legs. He really needed to find a way to take shortcuts without Papyrus noticing, especially after he had been lying down for so long. Papyrus would hate knowing that he could get across the house without having to move. But it was getting harder and harder to convince himself to walk when Papyrus wasn’t around to insist that he get off the couch.

He followed Papyrus into the kitchen, and put the frozen dinner in the microwave as Papyrus got the quiche out of the fridge. Sans made sure to slip across the room and set the oven to preheat to the right temperature before his brother could touch it. Undyne had apparently told him that the hotter the oven was, the faster the food reheated, and though it was occasionally funny to see how different types of food turned to ash, he didn’t want to risk his brother going hungry—or starting another batch of spaghetti when Sans was too tired to make sure nothing caught fire.

“YOU SEEM TO ENJOY COOKING MUCH MORE AS OF LATE, BROTHER,” Papyrus said as he slid the quiche into the oven and closed the door, thankfully putting in a reasonable cooking time to reheat the quiche while the frozen dinner spun round and round in the microwave. “WHAT HAPPENED? WERE YOU INSPIRED BY MY COOKING LESSONS WITH UNDYNE? ONLY … BEFORE THEY STARTED HAPPENING?”

Sans looked away for a moment, then turned back and shrugged, as if it didn’t matter.

“just thought i’d try out something new.”

Papyrus gave him a funny look, but said nothing more about it.

Sans had considered, once or twice, telling his brother where he had gotten the recipes for the things he had been cooking. But he always decided against it. If only out of respect for the person who had given them to him.

Besides, he wasn’t sure it was a very good idea to give Papyrus the idea of making a quiche when he was still trying to learn how to make spaghetti.

In any case, Papyrus seemed to enjoy the quiche, and Sans was content with his frozen dinner. Papyrus chatted on about his day, and Sans listened, as usual. It was boring, but it was familiar, and Sans had grown to appreciate familiar things.

Once they were through, Papyrus brought the dishes to the sink and the trash to the trashcan, scrubbing the plate clean so fast it was a wonder it didn’t crack in half. Sans watched him, and allowed himself to imagine a ruffly apron around his waist, just for a second, before forcing the thought away.

Papyrus had considered actually getting an apron once, two years ago, when he saw that Undyne had one in her kitchen.

It was the first and only time Sans had ever overtly ignored an idea for a Gyftmas gift.

As soon as the water was shut off and Papyrus took out a towel to dry the plate, Sans pushed himself out of his seat and lifted a hand in a lazy wave he knew his brother wouldn’t see.

“gotta go, bro. working the evening shift today.”

“OH, YES!” Papyrus replied, spinning around fast enough to send droplets of water spraying onto the floor. “YOU ACTUALLY SEEM EXCITED TO GET TO YOUR WORK TODAY, SANS. OR … AT LEAST LESS LAZY THAN USUAL! THAT’S VERY ENCOURAGING! ARE YOU CONSIDERING BEING LESS LAZY?”

Sans felt his smile tugging at the corners, and barely managed to hide it by turning around and starting toward the front door.

“eh, probably not. but you know, bro, it’s not my fault if i’m lazy. it’s just _in my bones._ ”

Sans didn’t turn around to see, but it was very hard to miss the sound of Papyrus bashing his head into the kitchen counter. He chuckled, then slipped through the door and out into Snowdin.

He walked for a minute at a slow, comfortable pace, waving at the monsters he passed and offering jokes or puns to those who weren’t occupied. Some of them rolled their eyes, and some of them chuckled. But in all cases, they smiled a little more.

Sometimes he caught himself wondering if that was why he had started doing it in the first place. To make everyone smile.

To make Papyrus smile, no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

Then, a minute later—occasionally even a few hours later—the truth would hit him, and he would either make so many puns even he couldn’t keep up with them, or he wouldn’t say a single one for more than a day.

He took a shortcut once he reached the edge of Snowdin. He could have easily taken a shortcut in front of the other townspeople—most of them had seen one of his shortcuts at one point or another, and just chalked it up to “another weird thing Sans does.” It wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t tiring. It didn’t even require the same amount of concentration or emotion as it had in the early days. It was like walking. At first, there had been stumbling and focus and uncertainty, but now he could do it half-asleep. And often did.

He stepped forward, felt space twist and fold around him, and when his foot hit the ground, it crunched in the snow a few yards in front of the door.

Something in him relaxed that he didn’t even realize had tensed up. He spent a moment just standing there, looking up at the door that had become so familiar over the past few months—had it been years yet?—since he had first run into it. Then he crossed the space between him and it, lifted a hand, and knocked.

Sometimes he would hear nothing. Sometimes he would have to knock a few more times, and wait.

But this time, only a second passed before he heard a chuckle.

“I was afraid you might not be coming.”

Sans felt his smile soften, as it always did, and let himself flop down into the snow against the door. “nah, just running a little late. had dinner with my bro.”

“Oh! That’s lovely,” the voice replied. He heard her settle down on the floor on her side of the door as well, far more gracefully than he had. “Did you have a good meal?”

“yep. we had the rest of that quiche i made last week.”

He didn’t have to see her face to hear her smile, even though he still had no idea what her smile looked like. “I’m so glad that recipe worked out for you. It’s an old favorite of mine.”

“yeah, it was _egg_ -cellent,” Sans replied. The voice snorted. Sans smiled wider. “and papyrus loved it. he’s started learning how to cook.”

“Oh, yes, you mentioned! How are his lessons going?”

Sans paused, wracking his head for the right words. “they’ve been very … passionate.”

“Ah,” the voice replied. “Well … it’s certainly a good thing to be passionate about what you do, but … I get the impression you don’t mean that in a positive way.”

Sans didn’t say anything, but he got the feeling the lady could hear his faint chuckle even through the wood of the door. Sometimes he imagined her meeting his brother, even if he doubted it would ever happen. He thought they would get along, even if Papyrus would throw a fit at all the puns. Of course, the lady wasn’t exactly difficult to like. Sans had no doubt she could get along with anybody, if she wanted to.

And she would love Papyrus. Even if so many people didn’t seem to see what Sans saw in his brother … the lady would. Maybe she could even teach him how to cook without blowing anything up. She was patient, and understanding, and gentle and kind and … and Papyrus needed someone like that.

He had Undyne. Undyne loved Papyrus, and Papyrus loved her back.

But … Papyrus needed more than one other person who saw exactly how great he was.

“Are you alright?”

Sans jumped, then tilted his head toward the door, toward the worried voice coming through.

“huh?” He paused, then cleared his throat. “yeah. course i am.”

“You seem … troubled by something.”

Sans felt himself laugh, an awkward, uncomfortable laugh. “you can tell that just by my voice?”

The lady chuckled, and he could hear her concern slipping through, even past her amusement.

“Well, when you have heard someone’s voice for this long, you learn to pick up on a few things.”

“true,” he muttered, as much to himself as to her. He hesitated a moment longer, than shook his head. “i’m fine. really. just … had a long day.”

He didn’t need to see her face to know she probably didn’t believe him. But she also knew him well enough to know when he wasn’t up to talking about something, and when, at least for the moment, to let it go.

He cleared his throat again.

“so. got any new jokes for me?”

He swore he could hear the lady perking up, even if he still had no idea how “perking up” made a sound.

“Oh, yes! I thought of a few new ones. And I also found a book lying around the Ruins that had several I think you will enjoy …”

And with that, Sans settled against the door, pressing the side of his skull to the wood to hear the lady’s voice even better.

His worries would still be there tomorrow. They would still be there later tonight, when he got off his shift or when the lady decided she needed to go to bed.

But for now, even if it was just for a while, he let them drift off into the corners of his mind, and let his smile settle into a soft curve that almost felt real.


	5. Chapter 4

“Are you ready, Papyrus?”

“I COULD NOT BE MORE READY IF I TRIED!”

If anyone else had said it, Flowey might not have believed them, and he was tempted not to believe it from Papyrus either. When his new “friend” had walked up to him wearing an old piece of cloth as a cape, Flowey was reminded far, far too much of his old self, and all the “fake battles” he had gotten into with Chara in the old days.

If this was how Papyrus viewed actual combat training, it was no wonder he hadn’t gotten into the Royal Guard yet.

Or maybe he just wasn’t taking Flowey seriously?

But Papyrus had proven himself a worthy opponent after their first lesson. He was precise, frightening so, and his attacks were stronger than most of the monsters Flowey had ever met. Either he was naturally talented, or Undyne really was as good a teacher as he claimed her to be.

Which left him just as confused as to why Papyrus hadn’t gotten into the Guard yet. He was definitely better than the rest of the Snowdin Guards Flowey had encountered, in this life or … his last one, and he probably could have made his way to the top ranks given a bit of time.

Yet he still hadn’t even made it in.

Flowey had run through several dozen possible reasons for that, and a few of them actually made sense. But he hadn’t decided on it yet. He had thought about just asking, and had come close a few times, but Papyrus seemed to trust Undyne’s judgment over anyone else’s.

He believed in his abilities, but he also believed, just as firmly, that he still needed to get better.

Because Undyne had told him so.

And Flowey might have believed that Undyne’s standards were just that high, except he had _met_ the other Royal Guards Undyne had hired, and he knew that Papyrus would have surpassed all of them in a blink.

“FLOWEY?”

Flowey jerked his head back up, blinking a few times before his eyes settled on Papyrus, still standing maybe twenty feet away, waiting for the first strike. Flowey smiled, as if nothing was wrong, and called out a quiet, “Gee, sorry, Papyrus, I got distracted!” before he summoned several bullets and readied them to strike.

And as always, Papyrus blocked them. Dodged some, knocked away others with bones he summoned just in time, then threw back attacks that Flowey had to honestly work to avoid. He had learned Papyrus’s patterns, his strengths and weaknesses, his tendencies in battle. He wasn’t hard to predict. But somehow, Flowey still wasn’t getting bored.

Papyrus was … interesting. Far more interesting than anyone Flowey had met in any of his previous runs. Flowey wasn’t sure exactly what _made_ him interesting, but after all this time talking to different people, trying to find _anything_ to cure his boredom, he didn’t really need a reason.

Papyrus had marched right up to an apparently-sentient flower and introduced himself, even though he had never seen a sentient flower before. He never questioned the fact that there was no one else like Flowey.

Granted, from what Flowey had seen, there were no other skeleton monsters either.

Except for Papyrus’s brother, of course.

He _knew_ about skeleton monsters. He remembered studying them when he was learning about different monster species. But he didn’t think he had ever met one before. Or … even heard one’s name. Or saw one passing by.

Had that happened with any other type of monster?

Of course, his family had been the only boss monsters left. And he had never asked his parents whether there were any other types of monsters who had become … much less common after the war. So maybe …

He sighed, under his breath, and shook his head to clear it as he shot a few pellets forward.

“YOU ARE TRULY A FORMIDABLE OPPONENT, FLOWEY!” Papyrus called out after another minute of being barraged with bullets. He didn’t even sound tired. Maybe vaguely out of breath, but in an excited way, not in the way that would suggest he was running out of energy.

Flowey could keep going for a while. He had tested that a while back: either this new form simply didn’t get tired, or … whatever had been done to him had changed something about him. He didn’t know, and he supposed it didn’t matter anymore. This was the way things were, and even if he did manage to satisfy his curiosity, nothing he did was going to change the way things were.

He grinned that saccharine grin that was starting to feel forced, yet oddly natural at the same time.

“Aww, thanks, Papyrus! You too!”

Papyrus smiled back, and threw another bone his way.

It was still weird, having someone call him Flowey, even after what must have been hundreds of resets, and several dozen people calling him by that name. But he wasn’t exactly going to introduce himself as Asriel. Not again, anyway.

And besides, he hardly even thought of himself as Asriel in his head anymore. It just … didn’t feel right.

Asriel had _felt_ things. Love. Care. Something for other people.

And to call himself Asriel now …

It felt like ruining the name of the person he had once been.

Because he wasn’t that person anymore. He didn’t really know who he was now, but he wasn’t Asriel anymore. He couldn’t be Asriel when he didn’t love his mom and dad. He couldn’t be Asriel when he didn’t … feel things, like Asriel had.

But … maybe that wasn’t so bad. Maybe … this new person, maybe Flowey, could be something good.

After all, if he could go back and try again as many times as he wanted, he could do a lot of good, couldn’t he? Even if he didn’t get it right the first time, he could try again, and again after that. He could help people. That was what he had wanted to do when he was alive, wasn’t it? He had wanted to help monsters.

That was why he had …

But he had failed.

He had been stupid, he hadn’t listened to Chara, and he had _failed._

And now he was … like this.

But … he had wanted to help people back then. And even if he didn’t really feel it now, he could _remember_ what it felt like. Sort of. That was what had led him to try to help all the people he had met so far—even if they didn’t remember it now—and that was what drove him now. He didn’t care about Papyrus, but he could _imagine_ caring about Papyrus. He could imagine him and Asriel being best friends. Naive, silly, goofy even when they tried to be serious … they would have gotten along great.

Flowey would never be Asriel, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t help Papyrus out.

And Flowey, unlike Asriel, was actually a half-decent fighter.

He could help him. He could do what Undyne apparently couldn’t. He could help Papyrus reach his dreams.

He could do something worthwhile, like he had never managed to do when he was actually alive.

Flowey barely noticed that one of Papyrus’s bones had made it through his defenses until he saw the flash of white heading right for his face, and by then, he had no time to move. He stiffened. Too late to pop underground, too late to dodge. All he could do was squeeze his eyes shut and hope that the check he had done on Papyrus’s attack strength was accurate.

The bone smacked into his face, then fell to the ground with a dull thud.

There was no pain.

And when Flowey opened his eyes a second later and checked his own HP, he found it undamaged.

He blinked.

“ARE YOU ALRIGHT, FLOWEY?” Papyrus asked, jerking Flowey’s attention back up to him. “YOU SEEMED DISTRACTED.”

Flowey stared for a second, getting his bearings before he nodded. “I’m okay, Papyrus. But you need to make your attacks stronger than that if you want to do any damage!”

He was _sure_ Papyrus’s bones had had more strength before. Was he getting tired? They hadn’t been going for that long, and Papyrus had always seemed to have a near-endless supply of energy …

“OF COURSE! THE GREAT PAPYRUS IS VERY STRONG!” Papyrus replied, beaming. “I JUST NOTICED THAT YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION AND THAT BONE THAT WAS GOING TO HIT YOU WASN’T VERY FAIR, SO I REDUCED ITS DAMAGE TO 0.”

Flowey stared longer this time. Quite a bit longer. Papyrus looked a little confused, but kept on smiling, waiting for the response he seemed so sure would come. At last, Flowey blinked, very slowly, finally beginning to process the words floating around in his head.

“You … reduced its damage?”

“YES!” Papyrus said, proudly, but the same sort of pride that came from a strong attack, or an impressive puzzle.

As if it were completely normal. As if it was _obvious_ that he should reduce the damage of his own attack because it “wasn’t very fair.”

“You can control how much damage your attacks do?” Flowey asked, leaning a little further and suddenly wishing—not for the first time—that he still had legs, so that he could step forward without having to pop underground first.

Papyrus smiled wider. “OF COURSE! IT IS ONLY THE POLITE THING TO DO.”

Flowey opened his mouth, ready to ask him where he had learned to do that, maybe he had been young but he knew enough about magic, enough about fighting, he knew that there were ways to increase your attack strength, even ways to decrease it, but to change it _after you had let the attack go_?

No one could do that. At least, no one he had met back then. Not even the old monsters, the powerful monsters, he was _sure_ his parents couldn’t do anything like that, but Papyrus … some random skeleton he met in Snowdin … and he didn’t even seem to think it was a big deal.

He hadn’t mentioned training with anybody, aside from Undyne, and Flowey was just as sure that she didn’t have that kind of ability. So where …?

And if he could do this, if he could do something this impressive and not even realize how impressive it was …

“Is that … all you can do, Papyrus?” he asked, tilting his head.

Papyrus stared for a moment before puffing his chest out again—not that there was much of a chest, just ribs below the fabric of his shirt.

“I CAN DO MANY THINGS!” He deflated a little and furrowed his browbone. “BUT … I’M NOT SURE WHAT YOU MEAN.”

Flowey paused, looking down at the bone that had begun to disintegrate in the snow in front of him. The bone that had done no damage at all. “I mean … when we were fighting, were you trying your _hardest_?”

Papyrus stiffened. It was brief, less than a second, but Flowey was watching, and he was sure he hadn’t imagined it. He looked away, and the high line of his shoulders dipped a bit as his mouth pressed into a thin, awkward line.

“WELL … I WAS TRYING VERY HARD!” he replied, glancing back to Flowey as if to be sure his point was made. He turned away again, his shoulders falling further. “BUT … I DON’T WANT TO HURT YOU.”

It made sense, on some level. Flowey could remember his mom—he couldn’t decide whether to just think of her as Toriel now—saying that even during sparring, you shouldn’t try your absolute hardest, because you might hurt someone.

But Flowey had seen the Royal Guards training before. And he was pretty sure they always tried their hardest.

Especially if Papyrus was learning from Undyne.

Flowey furrowed the spot that might count as his brow, then shook his head and perked up again.

“Can you do more cool stuff?”

“OF COURSE! I CAN DO LOTS OF COOL THINGS!” Papyrus replied, standing up especially tall. He hesitated. “BUT MANY OF THEM ARE WAY TOO DANGEROUS FOR A BATTLE BETWEEN FRIENDS.”

Flowey bit back a groan. Sometimes it really was tempting to just tell someone that he couldn’t die. Then again, he supposed, in Papyrus’s point of view, he _would_ die—even if it wasn’t permanent.

“Well … can you tell me about them?”

Papyrus fidgeted and looked away. “I …”

Flowey waited for him to finish, but it was clear, within a few seconds, that he wasn’t going to. Flowey frowned.

“Are your bone attacks all you can do?”

“YES!” Papyrus replied, bright and enthusiastic. Then he paused, frowning. “NO …?”

He stared off into the distance, apparently deep in thought, a tight furrow in the center of his browbone. He glanced back at Flowey, then away again, fidgeting.

“UM … I DON’T … I ONLY USE BONE ATTACKS IN FIGHTS,” he said at last with a decisive nod. “THAT’S VERY IMPORTANT. BONE ATTACKS ARE MUCH BETTER FOR FIGHTING!”

“But you have other attacks?” Flowey asked, somehow swallowing back his growing impatience.

“… THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT.”

Flowey clamped down on the part of him that wanted to snap out of annoyance. He looked Papyrus up and down, his wringing hands, his furrowed browbone, his shifting feet.

“It’s just a question, Papyrus.”

“I KNOW IT’S JUST A QUESTION,” Papyrus all but squeaked, jerking his gaze to Flowey again. He nodded, as much to himself as to Flowey. “I KNOW. IT’S … BONE ATTACKS ARE THE BEST. SO I ONLY USE BONE ATTACKS.”

Flowey raised an eyebrow he knew he didn’t have, but just sighed.

“Okay … what about other things you can do? Like … you said something about your blue attack?”

“OH YES! I AM VERY GOOD AT BLUE ATTACKS!” Papyrus said, immediately perking up, his discomfort slipping away like oil poured through his fingers. He lifted one arm, stretched out toward Flowey. “HERE! I WILL SHOW YOU!”

Flowey waited, staying perfectly still, ready for the blue bones to hit him. He had seen a few of Papyrus’s blue attacks before, though … he hadn’t called them that then. Well, maybe that was just another one of his quirks.

Papyrus stood there, arm pointed right toward him, his hand curling into a fist and magic sparking around it.

Flowey waited, but nothing happened.

Papyrus’s shoulders began to slump, his mouth curving into a frown, and finally, he let his hand drop back to his side.

“IT’S NOT WORKING.”

Flowey wiggled from side to side, stretching out his now-stiff stem. “What are you trying to do?”

“MAKE YOU BLUE!” Papyrus said, as if it should have been obvious. “OR … I MAKE YOUR SOUL BLUE, AND THEN I CAN LIFT YOU UP OR HOLD YOU DOWN!”

Flowey straightened again, pausing for a long moment before his gaze dropped to the snow beneath him.

“Yeah, that … that wouldn’t … that’s not gonna work on me.”

“WHY NOT?” Papyrus asked, because of course he didn’t know, he had no reason to know.

Flowey hesitated, then sighed. “Flower monsters aren’t like other monsters.”

Papyrus tilted his head, thoughtful.

“I’VE NEVER MET ANOTHER TALKING FLOWER BEFORE. ARE THEY ALL LIKE YOU?”

Flowey went silent again. He looked at Papyrus, took in the entirely innocent expression on his face. He would believe anything Flowey said to him, without hesitation. And a part of Flowey, a very, very small part of Flowey, wanted to tell him the truth. But he had given up on telling the truth so many runs ago he had long lost count.

So he just sighed.

“… yeah. They’re all like me,” he said, glancing away and forcing the thoughts to the back of his head before looking up again. “So where’d you learn how to reduce your damage?”

Papyrus straightened. “WHAT?”

“Reducing the damage on your attacks. Where’d you learn how to do that? I’ve never met anyone who could do that.”

Papyrus blinked, then perked up.

“OH, THAT’S EASY! I LEARNED IT FROM—”

He stopped, his whole body frozen in the same posture. His mouth hung open for a few seconds before he clamped it shut. A furrow formed in the center of his browbone.

“I …”

“What?” Flowey prompted, as gently as he could.

“I LEARNED IT FROM …” Papyrus went on, then trailed off again. He looked down at his feet, then to Flowey, then to his feet again. “I … I KNOW I LEARNED IT SOMEWHERE.”

“Yeah.”

Papyrus fidgeted, avoiding his gaze so skillfully that Flowey wondered how many times he had done it before. “BUT I … I DON’T EXACTLY … HAVE THE NAME OF THE PERSON I LEARNED IT FROM. AT THE MOMENT.”

Flowey blinked, a long, slow blink, even though he shouldn’t have eyelids.

“You forgot?”

“I DIDN’T FORGET!” Papyrus all but squeaked, straightening up and meeting Flowey’s eyes for a second before shifting them away once more. “I JUST … DON’T REMEMBER.”

“Okay …” Flowey murmured, unable to keep the confusion out of his voice. But Papyrus was still fidgeting, and Flowey knew a lost battle when he saw one. He sighed, quietly, then turned back to him. “Hey, um … can you show me the trick again? How you reduce the damage of your attacks?”

And suddenly Papyrus’s discomfort was gone, as if it had never been there, as if it had simply slid out of his body and disappeared in the snow. He grinned, confident and proud, and brought a hand to his chest.

“OF COURSE I CAN! I AM VERY SKILLED AT IT!”

Within a second, he had summoned several bones—white rather than blue—and Flowey forced himself to stay perfectly still as they flew toward him and slammed into his face and stem.

And they didn’t hurt.

They hit him. They hit him all over, they bashed into his stem, into his petals, into his _face,_ normally it would have hurt a lot, knocked him over, even yanked some of his petals off, but … nothing.

He _felt_ them. They weren’t blue, they weren’t just going right through him, and besides, even though he tried to stay still, he was moving too much for them to be blue attacks—the regular kind of blue attacks, not the kind that Papyrus could apparently use. He felt them hitting them, but they didn’t hurt at all, and no matter how many hit, his HP never went down.

He tried to remember anyone else he had met who could do that, but he couldn’t name a single one. And he had met a _lot_ of people during his time as a flower.

Even his parents couldn’t do that, and they were some of the most skilled magic-users he had ever met.

Papyrus stopped, and Flowey stared at Papyrus for a few seconds longer. Papyrus continued to stand up tall and proud, though Flowey could detect just a hint of uncertainty beginning to shine in the backs of his sockets. So Flowey forced his own shock aside and smiled, wide and as genuine as he could.

“That’s really cool, Papyrus!” he said, and he managed to make it sound like he had just done a juggling trick rather than defied everything Flowey had ever learned about magic.

Papyrus stiffened, his eyes wide, and for a second, Flowey wondered whether he had somehow said something offensive. Then he noticed the gleam in Papyrus’s eyes was wondrous, _happy,_ instead of upset, even as Papyrus opened and closed his mouth, struggling to speak.

“REALLY? I’M COOL?!” he asked, barely louder than a squeak. Then, before Flowey could respond, he cleared his throat and stood up even straighter, proud and strong, a clean mask painted over the sheer joy on his face. “I MEAN … OF COURSE I’M COOL! I’M VERY COOL AND SO ARE MY ATTACKS!”

Papyrus rambled on about how great and impressive his skills were, the words seeming to flow more and more easily the longer he went on, but Flowey let the words drone into background noise. He stood there in the snow, watching his new friend, and bit by bit, he felt his mouth curl up into a smile he didn’t even have to fake.

Well. He _had_ been getting more and more bored lately, and as interesting as Papyrus was, that interest wasn’t going to last forever.

Maybe solving the mystery of Papyrus would be exactly the kind of entertainment he was looking for.


	6. Chapter 5

Solve the mystery of Papyrus. That was what he was supposed to do.

Flowey had hoped that if he trained with Papyrus a little bit longer, that he would have his questions answered. He would solve Papyrus just like he had solved every other mystery he had run into. He would solve it, and then he would get bored and go back and move on to something else.

That was the way it had been with everyone he had gotten to know since he first woke up in the garden.

And he had gotten to know a _lot_ of people. He had heard so many stories, learned so many things. Things he probably would never have learned when he was alive, because people were a lot more willing to be honest with a strange flower that meant nothing to them than the nine-year-old prince of the underground. And it had been interesting at first. It had been amazing to learn so many new things, and he had soaked up the new information like freshly-squeezed sponge.

But nothing lasted forever, and that included his interest.

He had accepted, a while back, that everything got boring with time. That every mystery could be solved if he put enough time and energy into it—both of which he had more than enough of. Every interesting thing would stop being interesting, once he spent enough time doing it.

But Papyrus … was giving him more questions than answers.

And he didn’t seem ready to stop anytime soon.

Granted, it had only been a few weeks since they started training. Maybe a little over a month? Flowey hadn’t been counting. He had spent more time with people before. Maybe not a _lot_ more time—his patience didn’t last forever, especially when he couldn’t form real emotional attachments with the people he got to know—but a fair amount of time. Especially because he had been so hesitant to pry at first. He was better at that now—even if it was rude, he knew that sometimes prying was the only way you could find out what you wanted to know. And even then, it could take time.

But this amount of time with just about _anyone_ else would have given him more answers than he had gotten with Papyrus. And it wasn’t even like Papyrus refused to tell him things. He would … dodge questions, or carefully avoid answering them all the way, but he didn’t just clam up. He rambled on and on and told Flowey all sorts of things. Except none of them were what he actually wanted to know.

He tried not to let it bother him. It was … frustrating at times, but the reason he had started hanging out with Papyrus wasn’t _just_ to get his questions answered. He liked spending time with him. He was … nice. Entertaining. A welcome distraction from the drudgery and boredom of everyday life.

And he was still a mystery. An unsolved mystery was no less interesting just because he hadn’t gotten any closer to solving it.

A bone went flying past his head, and he snapped his attention back to the present moment just as another bone whacked into his stem. He grunted, but shook it off, summoning more pellets to shoot back in Papyrus’s direction, some to deflect the bones and still others to try and get a hit in.

Yeah, this was fun. Even if it wasn’t helping him solve the mystery, even if all he did was spar with a competent partner, that was still enough to keep him entertained.

At least for now.

Another bone skimmed at the edges of his petals, and he felt the slight burn that came with it before he pushed the pain to the back of his head and focused on the battle. But the battle only lasted a few more seconds before the bones stopped, and Flowey let his remaining pellets fall to the ground, huffing a little before he straightened and put on his widest grin.

“Great job, Papyrus!” he said, the ultra-sugary voice coming out more easily than it had even a week before. He tilted his head. “But what’d you stop?”

Papyrus stood up taller, as he always did when he was drinking in praise.

“YOUR HP WAS GETTING LOW!" he replied. “YOU SHOULD TAKE A MOMENT TO HEAL! OR I CAN HEAL YOU! YES, THAT WOULD BE THE BEST CHOICE! THAT WAY WE CAN GET RIGHT BACK TO TRAINING! HERE, I WILL—”

“No!”

Flowey said it without thinking, as soon as he realized Papyrus was moving forward, his hands out in front of him, ready to heal him like Flowey had seen him heal Undyne from a distance a few days before. He was good at it, without a doubt, and it would definitely get his HP back up faster.

But …

He didn’t know. He just … the idea of Papyrus being that close to him … he hadn’t been healed since he was alive, and he didn’t know how … he didn’t even know _if_ it would work.

And he didn’t particularly want Papyrus to be the first person to see what might happen if it didn’t.

He chuckled, forcing a smile, trying to make his expression as casual as possible.

“No, I … I’m alright, Papyrus,” he managed, and it almost sounded casual. “Why don’t we just keep going?”

Papyrus’s concern lingered for a few seconds longer. Then he stood up straighter, putting a hand on his chest and lifting his head tall.

“IT WOULD BE IRRESPONSIBLE OF ME TO CONTINUE FIGHTING WHEN YOU ARE STILL SO WEAK, FLOWEY! I WILL WAIT AS LONG AS YOU NEED!”

Flowey barely kept himself from groaning, and couldn’t quite stop his smile from slipping off his face. He didn’t _need_ any time to heal, he was _fine,_ couldn’t Papyrus see that? He didn’t care if his HP dropped, he didn’t care if he _died_ , he could just—

But … no. Papyrus didn’t know that. Of course he didn’t know that. How would he? It wasn’t like Flowey had told him, and it wasn’t like he was _going_ to tell him. And Papyrus always seemed so adamant that he not fight anybody who wasn’t strong enough to take his attacks …

It was … irritating. But he supposed there was nothing to be done about it.

He could wait. He had done a lot of waiting. If there was one thing he had plenty of, it was time.

But that didn’t mean his patience was infinite.

He waited a few minutes, and did all he could to nudge his HP into recovering as fast as he could manage. He thought about telling Papyrus that he was already recovered, but he knew Papyrus was too good at checking to see past that. So he waited, as patiently as he could, while Papyrus stood there and just … watched him, a bright smile on his face, never seeming to grow tired or bored.

Flowey wasn’t sure whether to be amazed, jealous, or annoyed.

Probably more annoyed, at this point. He didn’t like it when people didn’t believe him. When they thought they knew him better than he knew himself. He hadn’t liked it when he was alive, when he was a _kid,_ and he liked it even less now.

He knew that Papyrus was concerned. More than most people were concerned. He knew that Papyrus stuck to his values much more firmly than any monster Flowey had met so far. And he knew that nothing he could do would make him change his mind once he had made it up.

It should be a good thing. It _was_ a good thing, wasn’t it? Someone who didn’t do as he expected. Someone who kept defying everything he had come to believe about the people he met.

Someone who did something _new._

That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Something _new._

But as many times as he told himself that, he couldn’t stop the frustration building like a bubble inside him.

He managed a full five minutes before his patience broke, and he pulled himself up as tall as he could, giving himself a quick internal check to make sure that his HP was at least enough to satisfy Papyrus. It wasn’t at max, or even close, but it was a good deal better than it had been before, and that was good enough for him.

So it _should_ have been enough for Papyrus, too.

“Okay, Papyrus, I’m ready! Let’s keep going!”

Papyrus gave him an uncertain look, and looked him over again, roots to petals, as if he would see some condemning evidence there. Apparently—obviously—he found nothing.

“WELL … ALRIGHT,” he said, fidgeting, with a soft and resigned sigh. “BUT ONLY A LITTLE BIT! YOUR HP STILL SEEMS A LITTLE LOW, SO I DO NOT WANT TO RISK YOU GETTING HURT MUCH MORE!”

Flowey smiled a little tighter. “I’m _fine,_ Papyrus, let’s just go!”

It came out harsher than he had intended, but he didn’t take it back, and after a brief moment of staring, Papyrus summoned a bone and threw it at him, summoning another a second later to block the pellets Flowey sent hurtling his way.

It was clear, from the first minute, that Papyrus wasn’t fighting at even half of his normal strength.

Flowey tried to ignore it at first. Well, not _ignore_ it, per se, but not _say_ anything. It was only natural that he would _encourage_ Papyrus to fight at his full strength by being … a little more ruthless than usual. He was just trying to make sure this was a fair fight. Papyrus could hold his own, Flowey knew he could, he had just to make sure he was putting in enough _effort._

But Papyrus refused.

He would defend himself, sure. He was good at that, good at summoning bones at the last second to keep himself from getting a pellet to the face. But Flowey didn’t have to work nearly as hard to keep the bones from hitting _him,_ and even after several minutes had passed, even after Flowey had proved that he was _fine,_ he didn’t need to be babied, he could handle himself, Papyrus didn’t up his game.

“C’mon, Papyrus, I can take more than that!” Flowey called out, trying his best to make his voice sound casual, even though he felt like snapping. “You’re the best sparring partner I’ve got!”

Papyrus straightened under the praise, but his expression still held more than a little of that old concern.

“I … AM NOT SURE IF THAT IS THE BEST IDEA, FLOWEY. YOUR HP IS STILL LOW!”

“I said I’m _fine,_ Papyrus,” Flowey bit out, barely managing to keep his tone even. He straightened up and pasted a wide smile on his face. “Pinky promise! Or, uh … petal promise. I can take whatever you dish out! So just start dishing it out!”

Papyrus gave him a long, wary look, and it took all Flowey’s willpower to keep smiling. Finally, Papyrus’s shoulders slumped, and he let out a long, heavy breath.

“WELL … ALRIGHT.”

He summoned another bone, and Flowey bit back the sigh of relief building in his throat.

Good. Good.

And so they kept going, back and forth, just like before, only this time with Papyrus putting actual effort in. It still wasn’t quite at his usual level, and several times Flowey considered stopping to try to convince Papyrus to do just a _little_ better. But he doubted it would work, and besides, this was good enough. It was interesting, even if it wasn’t much of a challenge.

It might have even stayed interesting, if Papyrus hadn’t stopped right in the middle of summoning another bone, only three minutes later.

Flowey grit his teeth.

“Why did you stop?” he asked, and he barely managed to keep his voice even.

Papyrus frowned even deeper than before, concern twisting his face into something that almost looked pained.

“YOUR HP IS MUCH TOO LOW TO CONTINUE! IT WAS LOW BEFORE, BUT NOW I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CONTINUE SPARRING WITH YOU UNTIL YOU TAKE THE TIME TO HEAL!”

He nodded to himself, apparently proud of his own conclusion, standing as tall and proud as he ever had.

And Flowey snapped.

“What’s wrong with you?!”

The words tumbled out all on their own, and by the time he realized what he had said, Papyrus was already staring at him, frozen, eyes wide and confused.

“WHAT?” he asked, his voice somehow quiet even though it hadn’t lost a bit of its usual volume.

And the tiny voice telling Flowey to stop, to leave it be, to just claim that he had said something else and _move on_ and not get into this he didn’t want to hurt anyone he had _never_ wanted to hurt anyone—

That voice was quieter than a whisper, and far, far too easy to push away.

Flowey pushed himself up straighter, and curled his mouth into a snarl.

“I _said,_ what is _wrong_ with you? Are you an _idiot_? I know you can fight _,_ so just _hit me already_!”

Papyrus stared, his eyes wide, his teeth barely parted, something shining in the backs of his sockets that seemed at once incredibly familiar and terribly new.

Then Flowey’s words echoed back to him, bouncing around in his head, in a skull that no longer existed.

Words that burned with every place they touched, words bit out in a voice sharper than he had known Asriel, or Flowey, was even capable of.

And he went back.

He didn’t even think about it before he did it. He just … jumped, as if on instinct. As if it was the only action that made sense.

And even when he found himself alone, poking out of the ground in Snowdin where he had been an hour before, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.

He stayed there, silent, motionless, for five minutes, until he heard the faint crunching of boots in the snow. He looked up just in time to see Papyrus bounding toward him, waving his arm high in the air, and took a long second to compose himself before he perked up, smiling as wide as usual. It was … almost scary how easy it was to fake it.

Papyrus didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong. Well … he did, a little. Papyrus was … very observant at times. But he didn’t say anything about it, and he didn’t seem upset by what Flowey had said. Because Flowey hadn’t said it. Not this time.

“ARE YOU READY TO START OUR TRAINING?” Papyrus asked after a minute, wherein he had done most of the talking while Flowey just stood there in the snow, watching him and thinking back to the words that had fallen out of his mouth.

He nodded, distracted, but certain.

“Yeah! Definitely! Uh … how about you start? Show me that trick again, with the attacks that don’t do any damage!”

Papyrus seemed happy by that. He loved showing off his tricks, and not doing any damage … well, Flowey was beginning to believe that the lower the chances of him hurting someone, the happier he was.

“OKAY!”

And then he was off, throwing bone after bone that rammed into Flowey’s face and didn’t even make him flinch, and Flowey finally allowed himself to drift back into his own head.

Why had he done that? Why had he … he would _never_ have done that before. He never _had_ done that before. He had … he had said a few mean things, sure, when he had gotten frustrated, that was one of the reasons why he had gotten into the habit of making points to go back to so frequently, but … he had never said anything like this. Not to Papyrus. And not about something that he should have been able to understand.

Because _he_ had hated hurting anyone when he was learning magic, too. The first time he hit Dad with an attack and actually made his HP drop, he had been horrified, and Mom assured him that if he didn’t want to train that hard, he didn’t have to. He hated hurting people, so why …?

Even if it seemed silly now. Silly to be so worried about so little damage, Dad had _plenty_ of HP, a few lost points wasn’t going to do any permanent damage. It barely even made him uncomfortable.

But Asriel had hated it.

Even if Flowey didn’t mind quite so much.

Still, he should have understood. He should have remembered what that felt like, he should have _empathized,_ maybe he couldn’t feel it in the same way as he had before but … he should have …

Another bone hit him in the face, and even though it didn’t do any damage, didn’t hurt at all, Flowey looked at Papyrus’s face and swore he could still feel the sting.

This wasn’t what he was supposed to do.

He was going to make things better for everyone. That was what he had decided, right? If he couldn’t die … if he was doomed to stick around here without an end, without a soul … if he could go back as many times as he wanted, if he could learn things about people without them even knowing … then he would help them. He would make them happy.

That was what he had always wanted.

Well. That was what _Asriel_ had always wanted.

But … he _was_ Asriel. Wasn’t he?

He was Flowey. But … he was still Asriel. Or … he was _kind of_ Asriel. He didn’t have the same body, and technically he didn’t even have Asriel’s _soul,_ but … he still had the rest of him. He had his memories. He had his personality—or one a lot like it. He had changed a lot since he became Flowey, but he still had some of his old mannerisms. He was still him.

But he was Flowey, too. In Flowey’s body, with Flowey’s abilities, and Flowey’s … lack of soul. And that made a difference.

Asriel would have felt some sort of emotional connection to people around him. Asriel would have felt the warmth of Dad’s words, his reassurances, would have felt the same affection he had always felt for him.

Asriel would have loved Mom with all his heart.

But Flowey … didn’t.

He didn’t feel anything toward her.

What would Mom think, if she could see him now? If she knew the things he had done, if she knew that he had snapped at someone like that? She wouldn’t be mad, of course, because Mom didn’t get mad at him. She understood. She always understood, just like she understood when Chara had hurt him. She would step in, intervene, make sure no one else got hurt. Then she would talk to them separately, figure out their sides, before bringing them together to resolve it.

But Mom wasn’t here now. And the people that Flowey had hurt didn’t even remember it.

Because for them, it had never happened.

If he had still been Asriel … it probably wouldn’t have mattered whether or not they remembered. He still hurt them. So he would still feel bad. He would still want to make amends.

Now …

Now he didn’t.

He didn’t feel bad about manipulating people’s lives, because in this timeline, he hadn’t. He didn’t feel bad about saying things to upset them, because they didn’t remember it.

He didn’t feel bad about snapping at Papyrus, because as far as Papyrus was concerned, he never had.

Asriel could never have lived with that kind of guilt.

But Flowey didn’t even feel it.

Asriel had wanted to make people happy … but Flowey …

Flowey … just wanted to stop being bored.

A bone whizzed past his face, with some attack strength this time, and Flowey pulled his attention the fight once again.

He could think about that later.

For now … for now he could just make sure that his HP stayed at a decent level, and see exactly how long Papyrus could keep fighting without wearing himself down.

Yes. That sounded interesting.

Besides, he had all the time in the world.

And all the chances to do it over if he messed it up.


	7. Chapter 6

It had been a week since Papyrus had last checked in on him at his station, and today, he was late for dinner.

Papyrus was _never_ late for dinner.

Sans had never asked him why, but apparently the idea of eating dinner with Sans, no matter what that dinner happened to be, was more important than any of the other “very very important” things he had going on. Even if he had to sprint home, even if he barely got his work done in time, he would always be on time for dinner.

To be fair, he was only ten minutes late. But ten minutes might as well have been an hour for how much it broke with Papyrus’s usual tendencies. He was … very strict, at least with himself. He always got home exactly five minutes before they ate, at precisely 6:15 in the evening. They would take approximately thirty minutes to eat, depending on how much they chatted—or how irritated Papyrus was about Sans’s apparent laziness—and then they would watch some TV. Sometimes Sans went out in the evenings, and sometimes he just stayed in with his brother. Then, at 11:00, Papyrus would change into his pajamas, climb into bed, and wait for Sans to read him a story.

It had been the same routine for at least four years, if not closer to five or six. And Sans had never realized how attached to it he had become until it was broken.

He paced for a bit, but found himself getting tired out—he rarely actually _walked_ much nowadays—so he just flopped down on the couch and twiddled his fingers, picking at the bone of his knuckles.

6:26. 6:27. 6:28.

Sans made out the thundering footsteps only seconds before the door swung open, slamming into the wall to reveal his brother, standing there like a hero at the scene of a crime.

“NEVER FEAR, THE GREAT PAPYRUS HAS ARRIVED IN TIME FOR THE EVENING MEAL!”

The door fell shut behind him, and Sans managed to hide the rush of relief spreading through his bones by lifting a hand in a casual wave. “hey, bro.”

“HELLO, BROTHER!” Papyrus replied, grinning back at him. He took one step inside, then paused, frowning, and sniffed. “WHAT IS THAT DISGUSTINGLY GREASY SMELL?”

“dinner.”

Papyrus stared for a second before he noticed the large, greasy paper bag sitting in the middle of the dinner table. He pulled a face. “UGH! YOU ARE NOT EATING GRILLBY’S FOR DINNER!”

“no, course not,” Sans said. Papyrus huffed a sigh of relief. Sans grinned wider, and this time, it wasn’t even a challenge. He waved his hand toward the bag. “we're _both_ eating grillby's for dinner. ”

If Sans had been in a slightly better mood, he might have been able to laugh at the expression on his brother’s face. Papyrus turned to him with his hands on his hips, looking for all the world like an irritated grandmother.

“THAT’S EVEN WORSE, SANS! I DON’T WANT YOUR GREASY JUNK FOOD!”

Sans just smiled at him. Papyrus stared for a moment, as if Sans might actually give in and admit that his food was disgusting and he would never eat it again, but Papyrus was too smart to actually believe that. Finally, he sighed, his face a bit gentler, as he glanced toward the fridge.

“I THINK THERE ARE STILL SOME LEFTOVERS. _DECENT_ LEFTOVERS. I CAN EAT THOSE. AND YOU SHOULD HAVE SOME OF MY SPAGHETTI TO SUPPLEMENT THAT AWFUL GREASE!”

“nothing supplements grease more than grease,” Sans quipped, pushing himself up a bit on the couch.

Papyrus made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan, shaking his head in the sort of exasperation Sans might have expected of someone several decades older than him.

“SOMETIMES I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE REALLY MY BROTHER!”

Sans jolted before he could stop himself, his sockets going completely dark. But Papyrus had already turned away, before toward the fridge, digging around inside for something to eat, and by the time he turned around again, Sans had returned to normal.

For several minutes, he let the silence hold. Or their version of silence, at least—true silence was rare when Papyrus was around, and the same fact held true today, as Papyrus bustled around the kitchen heating up leftovers in the oven—after Sans had discreetly checked to be sure it was on a reasonable temperature. It was a comfortable silence, background noise, and it helped to soothe most of the leftover worry lingering in Sans’s bones.

Most of it. Not all of it.

He didn’t think all of it would go away until he understood what had made his brother late.

Because as hard as he tried, he couldn’t think of something that could have.

Undyne liked to train him for long hours, sure, but she always let him go by five at the absolute latest. Undyne might not be as strict as Papyrus when it came to schedules, but she was still very predictable. Besides, she knew when dinner at the skeleton house was, and she had always insisted that having dinner with family was just as important as any training she could provide.

Sans had never asked her whether she had held that belief before she had met Papyrus, but he was grateful for it nonetheless.

They sat down at the table with their dinners at around 6:35, and a tiny part of Sans couldn’t help but feel … uncomfortable at the late time. It was stupid. It was just fifteen minutes. It wasn’t like he had a proper schedule anywhere else in his life.

But with Papyrus …

He took a bite of his food, still a little cold in the center and too hot around the edges, but edible nonetheless. He looked across the table to watch Papyrus dig into the leftovers of the food they had eaten at a small Waterfall restaurant last week. That had been nice. Brief, because it had been lunchtime and Papyrus insisted he had to get right back to work, and that Sans couldn’t afford to slack off any more than he already was. But still, nice.

Sometimes he wished they could spend more time like that. Or … no, he always wished that. He just rarely did anything about it. He was busy with his jobs, and Papyrus was busy with his training.

And Sans didn’t want to do anything else to remind himself how little he knew about his brother now. How little he knew about this version of him.

Everything that made this version different than the one he had left behind.

And how bad he felt that he couldn’t just appreciate the brother he had left.

Still … they hadn’t been talking much lately. And maybe that was why Sans got worried so easily. He didn’t _know_ what was going on in his brother’s life, aside from training with Undyne and making puzzles, and maybe that made it easier for him to imagine the worst. Maybe if he knew more about what was going on, then he wouldn’t worry so much.

And maybe it would make him feel a bit more connected to his brother, too.

He set down his fork, looking across the table and hesitating for much longer than he should.

“have fun today, bro?” he asked at last, and it wasn’t even hard to make it sound casual.

Papyrus jerked his head up to face him, blinking, as if caught off-guard.

“HM?” Then the words seemed to click, and he broke out into a wide grin. “OH, YES! IT WAS A VERY GOOD DAY!”

Sans tried to let that grin relax him, tried to let it reassure him that everything was fine. It didn’t work. He tilted his head. “what’d you do?”

“MANY GREAT THINGS!” Papyrus replied, putting his hands on his hips and holding his head high. “I RECALIBRATED MY PUZZLES LIKE YOU SHOULD BE DOING, I BUILT SEVERAL NEW PUZZLES, I PATROLLED ALL OF SNOWDIN FIVE TIMES, I CHECKED IN WITH UNDYNE FOR MY PRIVATE LESSON, WE CELEBRATED WITH TEA BECAUSE THE KITCHEN WASN’T EVEN CHARRED WHEN THE LESSON ENDED, AND I SAID HELLO TO TWENTY-THREE PEOPLE!”

Sans paused. Sounded like a pretty ordinary day for Papyrus. Some of the details were switched up depending on the exact day, but it didn’t _sound_ like anything had changed.

But that didn’t change the fact that Papyrus had been late for dinner. And none of those things would have made Papyrus break a habit he had held to for six years straight.

“seems like you’re a lot busier lately,” Sans said. It was harder this time to keep his voice even, quiet, unaffected, but he had had far too much practice to mess up when it really counted. He cracked a smile that made his cheekbones ache. “don’t tell me _you’re_ running an illegal hot dog stand now?”

Papyrus stiffened, his face twisting into a frown so fast it might have been funny if Sans hadn’t been quite so concerned.

“HMPH! JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO REGARD FOR FOOD DISTRIBUTION REGULATIONS, THAT DOES NOT MEAN I AM THE SAME WAY!”

With that, he turned back around, peeking into the oven, even though he wouldn’t be able to see whether the leftovers were done heating. Sans considered going back to the couch, but found his feet unwilling to move, and his body rocking back and forth as he watched his brother, searching his expression, his posture, _anything_ that would give him a hint as to what had changed.

“so … what’s keeping you so busy?”

Of course, asking sometimes worked just as well.

Papyrus tensed, and for a second Sans thought he was going to change the subject again. He glanced over his shoulder at Sans, furrowed his brow, then looked to the oven again.

With what little he had could see of his brother’s face from this angle, Sans could just make out his expression softening.

“I MADE A NEW FRIEND.”

Sans blinked. His browbone furrowed, and he blinked again.

“you did?” he asked, and he absolutely hated that he couldn’t keep all of the surprise out of his voice.

But if Papyrus had noticed it, he gave no sign, and turned around just long enough to flash Sans a wide, proud smile.

“YES!”

Sans paused, letting that information sink in. “do i know them?”

Papyrus frowned, peeked in the oven again, then hummed and shook his head.

“I DON’T THINK SO. HE SAID HE HAD NEVER MET A SKELETON BEFORE.”

Sans came very close to asking his name. It made _sense_ to ask his name. But before he could get his voice to work, Papyrus had stood up from the table, carrying both of their empty plates to the sink, humming a little tune Sans was fairly sure he had heard before, even if he couldn’t place it.

And as Papyrus went about his routine, just as he always did, Sans stood by the table, watching him, taking in all of his mannerisms, all his little quirks, all the things that made him inexplicably _him._

All the things he had loved in the person he had known growing up.

And all the things that he was still getting used to, because the person he had known for all his childhood had never done anything like them at all.

He clenched his teeth and let his eyes drop to the floor.

This was his brother.

That was what he had told himself six years ago. That was what he had decided. He couldn’t keep talking about the “old Papyrus” and the “new Papyrus,” and he couldn’t keep thinking of just one of them as “ _his_ Papyrus.” It was all his brother. And this was the brother he had right now. The one he could still protect. The one he hadn’t failed yet.

But …

It wasn’t the same.

He had known that, even back then. He knew it would never be the same. And he had accepted that, hadn’t he?

The brother he had been born with … the brother he had grown up with … that brother was dead. That was brother was never coming back.

But Sans still _had_ a brother. Even if it wasn’t the same brother, it was … it was more than most people got, wasn’t it?

He still got to hear Papyrus’s voice every day—even if it was a good deal more booming and loud than he remembered it. He still get to see his face—even though his fashion choices were more than a little … unique at times, they were _him_ , and Sans wouldn’t have traded them for anything. He got to feel his hand patting his head, even if this hand was covered by a glove. He got to see him bustling around in the kitchen, even if he was helpless at making food.

He got to _see_ him, be with him, every day, even as his dust remained in another universe, further away than anyone here could imagine.

Maybe it wasn’t the same, but what he had was good enough. It _had_ to be good enough. It was all he was ever going to get. And he wasn’t helping anyone by wasting his life away trying to fix a machine that couldn’t be fixed. A machine that would _never_ be fixed.

And even if it _was_ fixed … it wouldn’t give him his brother back.

It wouldn’t give him his dad back.

The dead were dead. And it didn’t matter what he did. That wasn’t going to change.

And trying to compare the new Papyrus to the old one was only going to hurt both of them, the longer he kept it up.

“WELL, IT SEEMS AS IF OUR DINNERS ARE TAKING LONGER TO HEAT UP THAN EXPECTED. BUT! YOU WILL BE VERY PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOUR GREAT BROTHER MADE A DESSERT FOR US! AND HID IT IN THE BACK OF THE CUPBOARD SO THAT YOU WOULD NOT FIND IT AND RUIN THE SURPRISE! NOW WE CAN BOTH ENJOY THE FRUITS OF MY LABOR WHILE WE WAIT FOR OUR DINNER! EXCEPT NOT IN ACTUAL FRUIT FORM.”

Sans blinked and looked up to find Papyrus carrying two bowls of what he was fairly sure was chocolate pudding. Less … solid than pudding should normally be, by the looks of it, probably from having been sitting out of the fridge for so long.

“IT APPEARS THAT ONE OF THEM HAS A SMUDGE IN IT,” Papyrus added, giving one of the bowls a suspicious look. “BUT NO MATTER! IT WILL SURELY TASTE DELICIOUS NONETHELESS!”

Right. So _that_ had been what Sans stuck his fingers in earlier today when he was digging through the cupboard for a new bottle of ketchup.

Sans said nothing as Papyrus set the bowls down on the table—giving Sans the untarnished pudding and taking the smudged one for himself. Something deep in Sans’s chest clenched, and he forced himself to sit down, picking up the spoon and looking to his brother, sitting across the table.

Papyrus looked back at him, and when he caught Sans’s eye, he smiled, wide and proud, and Sans smiled back, without even having to try.

Yes. This was his brother.

Maybe not the same brother, but still his brother. A brother who deserved to be protected. A brother who deserved to be loved.

A brother who Sans couldn’t afford to fail again.

Papyrus looked away, back to his pudding, and Sans’s smile remained as he dug his spoon into his own pudding, scooped up a generous amount, and brought it to his mouth.

And froze.

Out of the tops of his eyes, he could see Papyrus beaming.

“I FOUND THE RECIPE IN THAT COOKBOOK YOU BROUGHT HOME FROM THE LIBRARBY AND THOUGHT I WOULD BROADEN MY CULINARY HORIZONS WITH DESSERTS, TOO!”

Right.

So that was why it tasted like mud.

Sans swallowed the bite of pudding with all the willpower he possessed, then, using just as much willpower, he flashed his brother the closest to a genuine grin he could manage.

Papyrus’s answering beam was worth all the mud-pudding Sans might ever have to eat.

And as he prepared himself to take another bite, it was easy to forget his worries. His grief. It was easy to forget all he didn’t know.

He could find out later. He could figure out what was going on, and make sure his brother was safe.

Right now, he had a chance to make him happy, and he was going to take every chance he got.


	8. Chapter 7

“I JUST WANT HIM TO TRY IT. I KNOW HE’D LIKE IT IF HE TRIED IT!”

He stomped his foot, just a little, his boot crunching in the snow. Flowey tilted his head in something between that looked like either curiosity or sympathy, or maybe both. Flowey’s face was hard to read sometimes.

“Maybe Sans just doesn’t like spaghetti?” Flowey asked.

Papyrus frowned and stood up a little taller.

“BUT EVERYONE LIKES SPAGHETTI! THAT’S WHY I MAKE IT! BECAUSE EVERYONE LIKES IT!”

Flowey gave him a funny look, but said nothing about it. He tilted his head the other way.

“Well, are you still enjoying it?”

“OF COURSE I AM!” Papyrus replied, without even having to think. “COOKING IS WONDERFUL!”

“Is it getting easier?” Flowey asked. “My—I heard that if something’s getting easier, you’re probably getting better at it.”

Papyrus paused. He brought his hand to his chin and held it for a second, thinking over the last few times he had cooked.

“HMM … YES, I THINK SO. THE POT ALMOST BOILED OVER YESTERDAY, BUT I STOPPED IT IN TIME!”

Flowey blinked, and for a second, he looked worried. Then he seemed to shake it off and smiled instead.

“That’s good.”

Papyrus just hummed.

It was funny. He didn’t remember how he had gotten distracted while he was cooking. He _never_ got distracted while he was cooking. But it had been like something … shifted, right in the middle of his stirring the pot. And he had almost dropped the spoon, almost let the pot boil over, like he had forgotten what he was doing there in the first place.

He looked back to Flowey. Flowey wasn’t looking at him, staring at the ground with a strange expression Papyrus didn’t know how to read. Papyrus didn’t ask him what it meant.

There were a lot of things about Flowey he didn’t understand.

He didn’t know where he had come from, since Flowey had never mentioned it before, and looked a little uncomfortable whenever Papyrus asked. He didn’t know whether there were any other flower monsters—he had never seen one, and Flowey couldn’t name any, not even family.

Flowey got very, _very_ uncomfortable when Papyrus brought up family, and Papyrus didn’t want his new friend to be uncomfortable, so he tried not to bring it up again.

He knew a lot of neat tricks, but he didn’t seem to want to go show them off, even to Undyne, even when Papyrus told him that Undyne would be very impressed. He knew a lot of people, almost everyone, knew all these little details about them that would suggest he was good friends with everyone, but he never wanted to go and talk to them.

And every time Papyrus thought he was learning something important about him, something meaningful, Flowey would flinch and change the subject, and pretend he had never said anything at all.

He reminded Papyrus a little bit of Sans.

But just a little bit.

They both didn’t want people to see what was going on inside of them, but what was actually inside of them was very obviously different.

That was the only reason that Papyrus hadn’t tried to introduce them.

Or told Sans anything about his new friend at all.

He would tell him sometime. Definitely. He was very proud of his new friend, and he wanted his brother to know about him. But …

Later. He would tell him later.

He didn’t really want to tell him now.

Even if he wasn’t totally sure why.

There were a lot of things about Flowey—or about his friendship with Flowey—that didn’t make a lot of sense. Things that he didn’t understand, and didn’t know how to start understanding. All of his friends were unique, of course! Undyne and Flowey and … did Sans count? Perhaps. Sans could be his brother and his friend at the same time. Even if they didn’t talk as much as Papyrus would have liked, and even if Sans kept a lot of secrets and Papyrus didn’t know why. He thought they were still friends. Brother-friends.

And Sans left Papyrus with a lot more questions than Flowey.

But Flowey was different in a whole other way. Flowey said things, knew things, that Papyrus didn’t remember telling him. He knew things about people around Snowdin, all around the underground, but then said he had never met them, or didn’t know them _that_ well. He would forget what day it was. A lot. He forgot things, but he also remembered things, like what Papyrus was talking about, even when Papyrus himself didn’t. Sometimes Papyrus would lose his train of thought and Flowey would pull him back on track so fast that Papyrus wondered if Flowey had their entire conversation memorized. Even the parts that hadn’t happened yet.

That was the funniest thing about Flowey. It wasn’t even something Flowey did. It was just … a feeling. A sense. It happened around other people, of course, plenty of times, but around Flowey, it happened almost every day. He could even feel it happening now.

That building feeling that they had talked about this before.

Not just this sort of topic—he was sure that they had talked about his cooking before, because he loved to talk about his cooking and Flowey was a good listener. But … the exact words. Even before Flowey said them, he swore he knew what words were going to come out of his mouth. He knew _exactly_ what he was going to say, before he said it.

Was he psychic? Was that what it meant to be psychic?

Or were they just such good friends that Papyrus knew what he was thinking, without even having to ask?

They had been meeting for a while, after all. Maybe Papyrus had really gotten to know Flowey that well already.

He smiled. Yes, that was probably it.

But that didn’t explain the look on Flowey’s face today. Or yesterday. Or the day before. The look on his face like he was … not really there. Not paying attention like he had done so faithfully since the day Papyrus had met him. Like _he_ knew what Papyrus was going to say before he even said it, so he didn’t even bother to listen. Maybe Flowey had gotten to know him just as well as Papyrus knew Flowey?

That made sense. That made the most sense of anything he could think of.

But still …

“—Papyrus? Are you okay?”

Papyrus stiffened and blinked, and found Flowey staring at him with wide, concerned eyes. The tension he hadn’t even noticed in his shoulders fell, and he smiled, as best as he could.

“OH, YES, I’M FINE. JUST … THINKING.”

“About what?” Flowey asked.

A tiny part of Papyrus wondered if he should lie, but he found the words coming out before that part could state its case.

“ABOUT YOU.”

Flowey stiffened. His eyebrows—he didn’t even _have_ eyebrows, just … a little space above his eyes—furrowed, and he tilted his head, letting out a soft, awkward laugh.

“What’s so interesting about me?”

Papyrus paused, thinking, then tilted his head. “YOU SEEM SAD.”

Flowey blinked. Then he blinked again. He chuckled, a humorless, awkward sound, like he didn’t know how else to fill the silence.

“… That’s a funny thing to say.”

“BUT YOU DO,” Papyrus pressed, because he couldn’t let it go now that he had said it. “YOU’VE LOOKED SAD FOR A FEW DAYS NOW.”

Flowey stared for a second, then dropped his eyes to the snow. Papyrus wondered if he was uncomfortable. He didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. But … the thoughts kept pressing at the edge of his head, and he had been quiet about this for so long, he had watched Sans suffer without saying anything for _so long,_ and …

“AND … EVEN BEFORE THAT. WHEN I LOOK AWAY, AND THEN I LOOK BACK AND YOU DON’T NOTICE YET, YOU LOOK SAD.”

Flowey pressed his mouth into a thin line, not looking up. Papyrus fidgeted.

“DID I SAY SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU SAD, FLOWEY?”

Flowey’s head jerked back up, and he blinked a few times before shaking his head. “N-no, of course not. I don’t think you could make anyone sad even if you tried, Papyrus.”

“WELL, I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THAT!” Papyrus replied, smiling, though it wasn’t a very happy smile. “I’M VERY TALENTED IN MANY THINGS, AND I BET IF I TRIED, I COULD MAKE SOMEONE SAD! BUT I DON’T WANT TO, SO I DON’T THINK I’LL TRY IT.”

Flowey chuckled. It was about as happy as Papyrus’s smile, but it was still a chuckle.

“Sounds good.”

Then he looked away again, and his tiny smile slipped away. Papyrus frowned, taking a small step closer.

“SO WHY ARE YOU SAD, FLOWEY?”

Flowey opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it and shook his head. “I’ve just been thinking.”

“ABOUT WHAT?”

For a few seconds, Flowey didn’t answer, and at first, Papyrus thought he might try to change the subject. He did that a lot, when Papyrus asked him about something he didn’t want to talk about. Flowey glanced away, then back to him, then away again.

His stem wiggled, in his own version of fidgeting.

“About … my … my family.”

“YOUR FAMILY?” Papyrus asked, a rush of excitement coursing through him. “SO THERE _ARE_ OTHER TALKING FLOWERS AROUND HERE? I’VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE!”

Flowey cleared his throat.

“Yeah, they … don’t live around here,” he replied, glancing off to the side again. “I haven’t seen them in a long time.”

Papyrus’s smile fell, a little bit. “YOU DON’T VISIT THEM?”

Flowey opened his mouth, closed it, then shook his head.

“I did … for a while. But they … it wasn’t going well. So I stopped.”

“OH.” Papyrus’s smile fell the rest of the way. He fidgeted. “IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE SAD ABOUT?”

Flowey looked away.

“No. I don’t miss them.”

Papyrus frowned. He couldn’t imagine not missing his family. But Sans was his only family … maybe he wouldn’t miss his family if he had had a different one. Maybe if Sans wasn’t … Sans, he wouldn’t miss him if he didn’t see him.

It was hard to imagine, but so was being a talking flower. So Papyrus didn’t say anything about it.

“DOES THINKING ABOUT THEM MAKE YOU SAD?” he asked instead, because he could understand that, a little bit. He could understand thinking about Sans and getting sad because Sans was sad and there were all these things going wrong that he didn’t understand and he didn’t know what to do to fix it.

Flowey hesitated for a few seconds, then sighed.

“I don’t know.”

His brow furrowed, as if he were confused, as if he hadn’t even realized before then that he _didn’t_ know whether that was making him sad. Papyrus waited, giving him a minute to gather his thoughts, and sure enough, after a little more than a minute, he straightened up again, shaking away the thought that seemed to have taken over his head.

Still, he stared at the snow, not even giving Papyrus a glance.

“I … had a sibling.”

Papyrus perked up. He came very close to smiling, to asking what their name was, what were they like, were they like Sans? How had they been friends this whole time and not even known that they could talk about their siblings together?

Then Papyrus noticed that Flowey had said “had,” and everything he had been ready to say died in his throat.

Flowey didn’t have teeth, not normal teeth, or lips, but Papyrus thought that if he did, he would be chewing his lip as hard as he could.

“They … they weren’t there for very long, but … my parents loved them,” he went on, slowly. He paused for a moment, furrowing his brow. “I loved them.”

He looked confused again, but this time it was briefer. The way he said the word “love” was funny, like he might say a word in a language he didn’t understand. Or a language he had understood a long time ago but then forgot. He went quiet for another minute, still staring at the snow.

“After they died,” Flowey went on, and Papyrus flinched, because even though he had known what Flowey had probably meant, it didn’t make it easier to hear it out loud. “I thought … my parents would miss them. Just as much as they missed me.”

He pressed his mouth into a thin line, the furrow in his brow a little deeper.

“They loved them. So they should … remember us the same.”

Something flashed in his eyes, brief and painful and too fast for Papyrus to hear.

“But he didn’t. My dad. He … he kept our stuff, he _remembered_ them, but he …”

He let out a small huff of a sigh, shaking his head.

“If he remembered them, he wouldn’t have done what he did. If he remembered them, he wouldn’t have been able to hurt those other kids. How can he say that he loved them when he killed all the others?”

Papyrus wasn’t even sure Flowey wasn’t talking to him anymore. He didn’t seem to be talking to anyone. It was like he had started talking and now he didn’t know how to stop, didn’t even remember why he had started in the first place.

“He never even _talked_ about them. The whole time I was there, no matter how long we talked, he didn’t talk about them. Not unless I brought it up first. And … and I thought maybe that was just what parents did, maybe it hurt too much for them to remember, but Mom … Mom remembered. Mom _talked_ about them. She kept chocolate in the fridge, even though they weren’t ever gonna come back. It’s _stupid,_ they weren’t ever gonna be there to eat it, but she still kept it, she still held onto them, and I don’t even know which is better, the one who holds on to someone who’s never coming back and _remembers_ them or the one who forgets that he used to care and pretends like all those other kids are _so different_ from the first kid when they’re _not_ and …”

His voice trailed off. His breath came in huffs, Papyrus didn’t think he needed to breathe, any more than Papyrus did himself, but he was panting, his voice cracking, his eyes wide and shining and he looked …

… He looked very, very young.

Papyrus swallowed and knelt down in the snow in front of the Flowey. Flowey jumped, staring at him as if he had forgotten he was there at all. Papyrus smiled, shaky and sad.

“FLOWEY,” he said, as if to ground him, to remind him of the sound of another person’s voice. “I … I’M SORRY YOU’RE HURTING.”

Flowey swallowed hard and shook his head. “I’m not. I’m …”

He trailed off again. Papyrus smiled a little wider. It still didn’t feel like a happy smile.

“I KNOW IT’S EASIER NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT,” he went on. “BUT … SOMETIMES THINKING ABOUT IT HELPS! SOMETIMES THINKING ABOUT IT … HELPS YOU MOVE FORWARD.”

He didn’t know why the words sounded right. No one he knew had ever died. Had they?

He shook his head and pushed his attention back to Flowey.

“YOU REMEMBER YOUR SIBLING, DON’T YOU?” he asked. Flowey hesitated, but finally gave a very small nod. Papyrus nodded back. “WELL, I THINK THEY’D BE HAPPY WITH THAT. EVEN IF … OTHER PEOPLE DON’T REMEMBER THEM THE SAME WAY, _YOU_ DO. AND I THINK THEY WOULD BE GLAD THAT YOU REMEMBER THEM. ”

Flowey looked away, his face even tenser than before. The sharp line of his mouth began to tremble.

“No they wouldn’t,” he murmured, so quietly Papyrus almost couldn’t hear. “They’d hate me. I … after what I did, I’m the reason they …”

Papyrus waited for him to finish, but again, he went quiet, staring off into distance. Papyrus frowned and tilted his head.

“THE REASON THEY WHAT?”

Flowey jerked his head up. He stared at him, his eyes wide, his mouth barely open. Like something had hit him. Like he had just realized something very important.

Like he was hearing his words echo back in his head, words he hadn’t even noticed were coming out of his mouth.

Papyrus shifted a little closer to him, opening his mouth, his own words building in the back of his throat.

Then the world around him began to twist and shift, and Papyrus felt something tugging at him, splitting him, like he was being ripped in two.

*

The spoon almost slipped from Papyrus’s hand, but he leaned over and snatched it, blinking as he stared down at the utensil he swore he hadn’t been holding a second before.

Except … he had. Of course he had. He had been cooking. He was practicing, just like Undyne had told him to do. He had set the afternoon aside specifically so he could get his cooking practice in.

But hadn’t he done the same thing yesterday?

His browbone furrowed, and he almost didn’t notice the pot beginning to boil over. He flinched and scrambled to turn down the heat. Undyne was always telling him to turn the heat as high as possible, the food would cook faster and have a much more passionate taste, but it was so hard to keep from making a mess when the heat was this high.

The pot settled down, and he picked up his wooden spoon to stir it. Some of the orange juice went flying, but the spaghetti stayed inside, and he considered that a success. With a satisfied nod, he tapped his spoon on the side of the pan and set it on the plate. It should be ready in another five minutes, he thought.

He had been making silly mistakes like that a lot recently. Forgetting what he had been doing, feeling like he had definitely been doing something else a second ago, and feeling like he had done all of this before.

But … no one else had mentioned anything. Sans hadn’t mentioned anything. So … maybe it was just in his head.

Perhaps his passion for cooking and training was just distracting him from paying attention?

Yes. That was a possibility. He liked that possibility.

Maybe he should ask Flowey about it. Ask him if he had been forgetting things recently, or finding himself in the middle of something without knowing how he had started doing it. Flowey was very understanding. If nothing else, he would listen. He was a very good listener.

They had already parted ways for today, but Papyrus would see him again tomorrow.

Maybe he could bring him some of his spaghetti. Maybe he would even try it. Papyrus didn’t know if flowers could eat, but … at least he could try.

But first, he had to dish up today’s masterpiece.

Sans would be home soon, and _today,_ Papyrus was sure, would be the day he finally tried his food.


	9. Chapter 8

Sans really should have learned years ago that there was no point trying to keep anything from the lady.

She was … perceptive, in a way that someone who couldn’t even see his face really shouldn’t have been. Or maybe that was _why_ she was so perceptive: everyone else looked at his permanent smile and thought it meant he was always happy. His face rarely changed much, not in ways they could understand.

But the lady … the lady never saw his face. All she had to go on was his voice.

So maybe that was why she noticed the little intonations he didn’t even realize were slipping in.

She had always noticed things like that, either based on his tone or in actual words that made their way into their conversation without him noticing. A different word choice than normal, a passing comment he made subconsciously. Sometimes he couldn’t figure out what had tipped her off, and she refused to tell him, because, in her words, “revealing my secrets would make it easier for you to keep your own.”

And when your entire friendship was built off of secrets, he supposed that wanting to know as much as possible about said friend made sense.

No one else had noticed how he had picked up two more jobs without even applying for them. There wasn’t a sentry for Waterfall or Hotland, so he had just … moved his Snowdin station there and started hanging out, and soon enough one of the higher-level Guards recognized that he wasn’t being paid for the work he did and promised that she would make sure his compensation was adjusted.

He never needed to make excuses to anyone else. But the lady noticed when he showed up less and less, and when he said that he had picked up two more jobs, she had grilled him on it, insisting that he was working too much—even though she knew for a fact he spent most of his work hours talking to her. He still didn’t know what he had said that had hinted at his … sneaky way of obtaining those two new jobs, but she found out anyway.

She found out, and she had sounded exasperated, but not entirely disapproving.

No one else had noticed when he started talking about shortcuts, when he had first come up with the word for his little … jumps. Everyone else had just assumed that he knew some weird way of getting around—and technically he _did,_ even if it wasn’t what they were thinking.

But the lady had latched onto that word. Latched onto it, and asked about it.

He hadn’t told her the truth, of course, just like he hadn’t told anyone else the truth. He had made something up—he couldn’t remember what now. It had been years ago, back when he first figured out that he could use his weird … ability … at will. It had been an accident the first time, when he was worried about Papyrus and he was on the edge of Snowdin close to the door and he _needed_ to get to Waterfall even though Papyrus was _fine,_ there was nothing dangerous, but still, he had to check, he had to see for himself, he had stared off into the distance and started walking with an image of Waterfall clear in his head and—

Then he was there.

His foot lifted off of snow and stepped down onto muddied ground.

It had taken him a few seconds to realize what had happened, and by then, he was already moving forward again, and a minute after that, he found Papyrus, training with Undyne, just as he knew he would be.

Going back home was … more difficult than that. Apparently thinking too hard about it just made it more difficult. He kept trying to figure out the physics of it, trying to find a name for what he was doing, trying to figure out what exactly Gaster had done that had made him like this—

Then, once he was so frustrated he decided to walk home, he pictured his house, and he was there.

It had gotten easier since then. He couldn’t do it everywhere—there were certain … spots, like edges, where he could just step over into another … area, as it were. Specific spots in Snowdin and Waterfall and Hotland and even the Capital. He just had to know where he wanted to go, he had to have been to that spot before, and he had to be exact.

Then he just walked, and ended up where he wanted to go.

He still didn’t understand it, not all the way. He had never worked out the physics of it, because it didn’t _follow_ laws of physics—not the ones he was aware of, anyway. Sometimes he found himself wondering whether his PhD was actually worth anything, if the actual laws of physics were so different from the ones he had spent so much time learning.

He tried to tell himself that Isaac Newton’s time hadn’t been wasted just because General Relativity came along and made his ideas about gravity obsolete, but that didn’t help much.

Because Newton’s laws had still been correct, most of the time. Einstein had just made them more accurate, opened doors Newton hadn’t even realized were there.

And maybe this was like that. Maybe teleportation was just opening doors that no one in the field of physics had thought of before.

But Einstein had had proper theories and equations for Relativity, and Sans was just stuck with “i can get places really fast and i have no idea how.” If he thought about it more than that, it stopped working all over again.

So he didn’t think about it. He just got places really fast and had no idea how, and he tried not to think about how many hours he had spent in class or in his internship or on school projects and how the only thing it had ever gotten him was a job that would end up ruining his entire life.

Instead he thought about how to make the new ability work for him as much as he could, and how best to explain it to the lady without having to actually explain the physics he didn’t even understand.

“Um ... hello?”

Sans jolted, blinking a few times as he turned to face the source of the voice.

Or, rather, the door.

“huh?” He blinked again, and suddenly he remembered that she had asked him a question, probably quite a while ago now, a question that had made him start thinking, and he didn’t even remember what it was. He sighed. “sorry, just got … distracted.”

“That’s fine,” the lady said, because of course it was fine, she never got mad at him. It was like talking to Dr. Japer: always understanding, always gentle, no matter what kind of mood he was in, no matter how much he had inconvenienced her. No matter how old he got, she was still happy to be like his … “If you need to go home and rest, I will understand.”

Sans winced, just a little, and shook his head. He had stopped caring a long time ago that she wouldn’t be able to see.

“nah, i … i wanna talk. talking’s … nice.”

The lady chuckled, and he could hear her smile, gentle and warm. Not for the first time, he wished he could see it. On the other hand, after six years of only hearing a voice, the idea of putting a _face_ to it was more than a little weird.

“Yes, I enjoy it as well,” she said, drawing his attention back before it could stray too far. “But we don’t have to talk about our usual topics, if you’d rather discuss something else.”

Sans shook his head again. “nothing really to talk about. just … got some stuff on my mind that’s not going away very easily.”

A pause. Sans waited, listening to the faint sound of the lady breathing on the other side of the door and trying to take comfort in the familiarity.

“You are still worried about your brother?”

The words were gentle, nonjudgmental, just like the lady always was. But Sans still felt his shoulders drop in something like disappointment. Because for once, it might have been nice to actually be able to avoid telling the truth.

“… yeah,” he murmured. He let a few seconds pass before clearing his throat, doing his best to lighten his voice to something that didn’t sound as heavy as a lump of metal. “sorry. i’m taking up all our valuable joke time.”

“Nonsense!” she replied, without missing a beat. He imagined her putting her hands on her hips in a pose that fit that voice like a glove. “That’s what friends are for. To talk about things. And we are friends, are we not?”

Sans’s face softened, and his mouth curled into a gentle smile he didn’t even have to force.

“yeah. course we are.”

She chuckled, and he swore he heard a bit of relief hiding under the amusement. “Good. And as your friend, I am happy to hear about your problems. Now, tell me what has been going on?”

Sans bit back a sigh. Right. If they were going to have a sappy moment, then he was going to have to actually say something halfway honest.

Well. He could probably make something up, if he wanted to. But as much as he kept from the lady, he didn’t think he could bring himself to actually lie to her.

He took a moment, adjusting himself against the door and letting his breath out long and slow.

“he’s just been … acting weird lately. i mean … he’s been late more often, and he’s _never_ late, that’s just not his thing, he’d sooner be somewhere two hours early than be late. and i … i didn’t think he had that much to do to _make_ him late, like … i mean …”

He trailed off, words failing him. The lady gave him a few seconds before she spoke up.

“Your brother does not stay busy?”

Sans almost snorted. “oh, no, he stays busy, it’s just … it’s all stuff he does by choice. or stuff for his training. but he never slacks off. he’s always doing something, it doesn’t matter what it is. always gives a hundred percent.”

Always gave a hundred and _ten_ percent, really. In everything. No matter how much he took on, no matter how much time or energy he spent on something, he never did it with any less passion or enthusiasm. He put his all into it, running from place to place, task to task, like he had some infinite well of energy that Sans would never be able to explain.

Sometimes it seemed like he was running from something, and the only way to escape it was to keep moving.

Sans just couldn’t figure out what he was running from, or whether there was anything he could do to stop it.

“Perhaps he is just so engrossed in what he is doing that he forgets about coming home?”

The lady’s voice snapped him back to reality, back to the present moment, and he felt himself sigh as he sagged a little more against the door.

“nah, he just started doing this lately, and he’s always been passionate about what he’s doing. i just can’t figure out what changed.”

The lady hummed in thought, and he found himself trying to imagine her again, what kind of thinking pose she would take, what it would look like on her, even though he still had no idea what she looked like. She was tall, he could tell that from how high her voice was. She sounded … soft? But he knew that the sound of her voice probably had nothing to do with her appearance. Alphys sounded quiet and gentle and she was covered in hard bumpy skin.

He shook himself out of that train of thought before it could go too far. Later. He had spent years trying to guess what the lady looked like, and he doubted that he was going to get any answers now.

Besides, that wasn’t the issue at hand.

She hadn’t responded yet, but Sans felt his own mind moving again, searching through recent events, the moments that had made him so worried. The moments where his brother had broken a routine he had spent years building up, falling out of it so easily when he wouldn’t have thought of doing so before.

“there’s other stuff, too,” he went on, so quickly and suddenly that the words seemed to have forced their way past his teeth. He paused, shaking his head, even though he knew she couldn’t see. “i … i don’t know, i can’t explain it, it’s just … something’s … off.”

“Off?”

“yeah.” He paused again, shifting his feet in the snow. “like i said. can’t really explain it.”

“But you have a feeling that something is wrong?” she asked, as gently and patiently as ever. “With your brother?”

Sans almost said yes. It would have been so easy to just say yes.

But a sigh worked its way out without his permission, and he found himself speaking.

“with him, yeah, but … with everything else, too.”

The lady hesitated, and he could hear her moving, just a bit, behind the door. “I’m not sure I understand.”

Sans grit his teeth and shook his head again. “forget about it. it’s … it’s nothing.”

“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be worrying about it,” she replied, without missing a beat. “I get the impression that you aren’t the type to worry if you don’t need to. That would take up too much of your energy.”

Sans almost snorted. Well. The lady did know him pretty damn well, after all.

“okay, okay,” he muttered, still smiling, and not even having to work to do it. He hesitated. “it’s … it’s hard to explain, though. i don’t know if I could put it into words.”

“That’s alright. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a way to describe the things that are bothering us.”

His smile twitched up, just a bit, but a second later he was right back to running the ideas through his head, trying to find a way to portray them in a way that wouldn’t make the lady think he had lost it.

After maybe half a minute of silence—and thinking so hard Sans’s skull was starting to hurt—the lady spoke up again.

“I know that there have been many times when the world felt … off-balance, as it were.”

Sans swallowed, and let himself settle against the door, the thoughts slipping from his head, if only for a little while.

He knew it wasn’t the same thing. It couldn’t be the same thing. But for some reason, right now, it didn’t matter.

There were plenty of things the lady would never fully understand about his life. But she was trying. That was more than most people had ever done.

“and what did you do?” he asked, as if it would actually make a difference.

Silence ticked by. One second. Two seconds. Three.

“Well, first I waited. I waited to see if the feeling would go away on its own. It often does.”

She paused, and Sans listened a little closer, letting his head drop against the wood. He swore he could hear a soft sigh, muffled and faint.

“But sometimes it doesn’t. And if I’ve waited and it remains, then I know it is up to me to do something about it,” she went on. Another pause. “I know that I have to face it. I have to see what is causing the feeling and face the truth of it as clearly and directly as I can.”

Sans wrapped his arms around his legs, pulling them closer to his chest.

“It is … not always easy. Sometimes it … hurts to realize the truth, especially if you have been denying it for some time. Sometimes it will hurt a great deal more than it would have to just let it be. But it is … a good kind of pain.”

Sans raised half his browbone. “good kind of pain? that seems kinda …”

He chuckled without much humor, and the lady chuckled back.

“I know it may sound silly, that pain could be good. But … it is a bit like pulling a splinter out of your finger.”

Sans almost found himself commenting that splinters weren’t really a thing when you didn’t have skin. But then he remembered that they had agreed not to say what they looked like, so he kept his mouth shut.

She shifted again, almost too quietly for him to hear.

“It hurts when it’s happening, more than it would have to just let the splinter sit. But even as it’s hurting, you know that it’s a pain that will lead to relief. And once the splinter is out, even though your finger may still hurt … the source of the pain is gone. It has been dealt with. And all that is left is to let your finger heal itself.”

In the silence, Sans found himself rubbing one of his fingers over another. It didn’t make sense, but he swore he could feel the ache there. The emptiness. The painful relief.

He could feel the lady doing her best to bandage it up, wrapping it up tight so he could forget about it and go about as if nothing was wrong.

“It might be easier to let the splinter sit,” she finished, gently, as he let his hand fall back to his side. “But you’ll never heal properly when it’s blocking your way.”

Sans swallowed, and let a soft smile touch his mouth.

“you’re really poetic, you know that, lady?”

She chuckled.

“Well, I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about my metaphors. But thank you, my friend. I do appreciate the compliment.” She paused again, and then asked, more hesitantly, “I hope my advice helped a bit?”

Sans lifted his hand again and held it out in front of him, all the bone perfectly intact. No splinters, no pain, no empty spaces. It would be so much easier if it was pain that he could see. Pain that his brother would be all too quick to heal.

But the universe had never made things easy for him before.

He hummed, as much to himself as to her.

“yeah. yeah, i think it did.”

He still had no idea how he was so sure she was smiling, but after almost six years, he was as sure as he was ever going to be.

“Good.”

Silence fell for a few seconds, but Sans picked it up as quickly as he could, juggling it awkwardly until he found himself reaching into the oversized pocket of his hoodie, pulling out the thing he had stashed inside before he left the house.

“so, uh, i found a new joke book at the library. i think someone just brought it in, i’ve never seen this one before.”

“Oh, really?” she asked, and her enthusiasm felt like something warm, soft, and all too familiar. “Well, then, I would love to hear your new material!”

He smirked. “what, you getting _bone_ -tired of my original jokes already?”

She laughed, and they went on like that for the rest of the day, just as they always did, just as they had done nearly every day for the past six years. Sans let himself pretend that this was all that was going on, all he needed to think about, that there was nothing else for him to get done, nothing in the world to worry about.

And at the best of times, when the lady’s laughter filled his head and jokes fell from his teeth as if they had done so all his life, he almost believed it.


	10. Chapter 9

A tiny voice in the back of his head told him that this probably wasn’t what the lady had intended with her advice.

But hey, it wasn’t like she had to know.

Besides, once the idea had sunk into his head, he couldn’t let it go. The uncertainty, the curiosity, the _fear_ had been building up inside him for far too long, and now that he had a chance to find a solution … well. He couldn’t exactly forget about that, could he?

He knew it was a long shot. He knew that just like everything else in his life, the chances that this would be resolved were more than slim.

But nothing he said to himself would stop his feet once they started carrying him away from his station one morning, taking the closest shortcut he could find to Hotland and up to the lab.

He had been to the lab before, of course, and he had passed by it many times more, and he had thought that the impact of it would wear off over time. And it had, somewhat. The first time he had seen it was like being hit in his nonexistent gut with a sledgehammer, and it took all his willpower to keep himself moving forward. At that point, he had yet to master his shortcuts, and if he wanted to get to the Capital or even most parts of Hotland, passing the lab was pretty much the only way to get there. The next time, the sledgehammer had felt more like a regular hammer, and after a few more trips, it was just like a particularly strong shudder running up his spine.

Only then did he realize that underneath the discomfort, a small part of him felt like he was coming home.

After six years, he still didn’t know how to feel about that part, but he was pretty damn sure it wasn’t going to go away.

Of course, passing by the lab was a good deal different than actually going _in_ it, and it had taken more than five years before he was willing to do that. The first time had only been a few months before. He didn’t _want_ to go in, and he had tried several ways to try to get Alphys to come out and meet him, but she kept insisting that she was busy with her work, and it was fine for him to come into the lab even though he didn’t actually work there. So finally, he had agreed.

It had taken him ten minutes of standing outside the door before he knocked, and even once Alphys opened the door and let him in, he still found himself looking over his shoulder with every step he took, listening for the sounds that weren’t there anymore, scanning the rooms for blueprints and papers he recognized, or waiting for someone to pop up in the corner of his eye and ask him how he had been.

It helped that the inside of the lab looked very, very different than the one he remembered.

Namely because there was only one person working there, and she had a very different style of decoration than Gaster, or Dr. Japer, or Dr. Lemming or Dr. Frewth.

It was much harder to think back on all the bad memories when there were anime posters and cup noodles and stacks of well-worn manga sitting amid the actual science.

That was what he focused on as he walked through the ground floor of the lab, his pace as casual as he could manage. He focused on why he was there now, not why he had come here in the past. He focused on _who_ was there now, not all the people who had been here before.

People who didn’t even exist. Because they were dead.

Or no one remembered they had existed at all.

To his luck, he found Alphys sitting at a desk just across the room, looking through a pile of papers and making notes. Her lab coat hung off her shoulders like she had forgotten to pull it back up, and her glasses were crooked, pushed to the side by her hand resting against one side of her face.

Even from a distance, she looked … upset.

Granted, Alphys always looked anxious—or at least she had the whole time he had known her in this world. That was just her personality, or her personality given her current life circumstances. She had been stressed before, and now that she had a big, important job, it only made sense that she would be more stressed now. And it had been a while since he had seen her.

But still … he was almost certain that she hadn’t looked quite this upset the last time they had met.

He stared at her for a long moment, wondering whether she had heard him come in, before finally realizing that she had no idea. Alphys might have been awful at hiding her emotions, but if she knew she wasn’t alone, she would at least make an effort. He closed the distance between them and stopped a few feet away, giving her one final chance to notice him, but she was engrossed in her papers—papers he couldn’t quite read from how her arms blocked his view.

Finally, Sans shifted, standing up a little taller and clearing his throat as quietly as he could.

“hey, alphys.”

Alphys jumped.

For anyone else, that might have been a metaphor, but no. Alphys actually jumped in her chair, hard enough to knock herself out of it and almost go tumbling down to the floor.

She caught her balance at the last second and stumbled as she got to her feet, blinking a few times before her eyes fell on him.

“Sans!” she squeaked, somehow even more nervously than she had sounded the last time he came by—though it had been a while, granted. She paused, standing up a little straighter and adjusting her lab coat around her. “H-how are y-y-you?”

Sans shrugged. “same as always. and you?”

“S-same,” she muttered, looking away. She glanced at him a few times out of the corner of her eye and wrung her hands in front of her stomach. “Um … did you n-need something, o-or …?”

She trailed off. Sans gave her a long, considering look, trying to figure out whether the gleam of paranoia in her eyes had been quite this bright the last time he had seen her. Finally, he shrugged.

“yeah, i was wondering if i could check out the machine i was working on a while back.”

Alphys furrowed her brow. “M-machines?”

“yeah, i think it was … three years ago?” he suggested. “maybe five. something like that. anyway, you said i could store it here, and i was wondering if i could go work on it for a bit.”

He had a lot of practice making himself sound nonchalant, and he hoped, not for the first time, that he was good enough to fool someone who knew him as well as she did.

Except … she _didn’t_ know him that well, did she?

Maybe that was why she nodded after only a few seconds, still fidgeting and glancing from side to side, but without a hint of suspicion on her face.

“U-um … s-s-sure. Yeah. I’ll … um … y-yeah, t-this way.”

She pushed her chair back up to her desk and moved her papers around in what might have been called sorting, if she had actually managed to make them look neater. Then she started across the room, toward the elevator, and Sans followed, watching each of her shaky movements and biting back every question as to whether she was alright.

He still wasn’t sure if he would call them friends, but she knew him, even if it wasn’t half as well as he knew her. He had tried to avoid her at first, in the months immediately after he and Papyrus had moved to Snowdin, but … he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. She was a familiar face, one of the very few familiar faces he had in this world, and even if it wasn’t _her,_ even if she would never know him like _his_ Alphys had, she was almost exactly the same, and just looking at her brought him a comfort he thought he would never feel again.

He hadn’t planned on spending time with her. Just … going to check up on her every once in a while. But when he found her trying to carry a huge box full of metal parts back to her house and almost dropping it, he had stepped in, without even thinking. Just like he would have stepped in back home.

She had accepted his offer to help get the stuff back to her house. She had introduced herself, and he could tell that she didn’t recognize him. He said his name, and she smiled, just a little, and said it was nice to meet him.

He had already suspected that she wouldn’t remember Papyrus, and that first conversation confirmed it.

The first few times he had seen her after that were just as unplanned, but a bit less unexpected. He had gone to check up on her, just like before, except now she noticed him, and greeted him, however shyly. Sometimes a greeting was all it was, and sometimes they went out to a cafe for a quick snack—she couldn’t stand braving Snowdin to go to Grillby’s, and his shortcuts had been far too shaky back then for him to risk taking someone with him.

They never hung out for more than a couple hours at a time, and usually not more than an hour. It wasn’t the same as it had been before. It would never be the same as it had been before. This Alphys had never babysat him. This Alphys hadn’t grown up knowing two little boys who loved her like a sister.

This Alphys had never watched him destroy his own life, then disappear for good.

Sometimes he looked at this Alphys, with her shy smiles and anime rants and nerdy passions, and wondered if his Alphys missed him.

He never dwelled on that thought long. It took him to places he had been many times before, and places he knew weren’t going to do him any good.

He focused on the now. The here. The version of Alphys that was with him, that liked him, that cared about him, in however small a way. And he focused on supporting her as much as he could, helping her like he would never be able to help his old best friend.

She apparently hadn’t forgotten her job at the lab after the … incident, though he got the impression a lot of things had changed. Before, she had been working under a supervisor, mostly just following instructions and helping out with projects.

Now … there was no supervisor.

And Alphys hadn’t been sure what she was doing there if no one was telling her what to do.

Asgore hadn’t fired her, of course. The king was much too softhearted for that. He had given her little projects to complete. Nothing that would usually be worth a full-time salary, but she got one anyway. She had told him once that she felt bad about accepting the money when she wasn’t doing enough to earn it, and he had told her, without really thinking, that maybe Asgore was just investing in someone with a lot of potential. Giving her time to hone her skills so that she would be an even better scientist in the future.

Despite her flustered mutters and blushing, it was the first time he had seen a real smile on her face in a very long time.

For years, that was how it had stayed. Alphys did her work, did more than she really had to, though she always stuck to the projects she was given rather than trying anything new in the lab. If she had an original idea—and she had plenty—she would work on it at home, maintaining the same sporadic sleeping schedule he had known her to have in his universe. She worked in the lab, she worked on her own stuff, and she watched anime. A _lot_ of anime.

He wasn’t sure when exactly she had started working on Mettaton. He hadn’t heard anything about the project until the news had spread around Hotland, around all the underground, and the next time he saw Alphys, she had already gotten the job he had thought she deserved since she was ten years old.

She had only been the Royal Scientist for a few months now, and Sans was still getting used to her being here all the time. Even though she had worked here a little for years, it was still … weird to see her in this space. He probably would have been happy to see her here once upon a time. He _had_ been happy to see her here once upon a time.

But now it was just a reminder that this wasn’t the same Alphys he knew.

Before, she had still spent all her free time at home. Now … now, he was pretty sure she had just moved in. She still _had_ a house in Hotland, as far as he knew. But all her stuff was here. All her anime and manga, and last time he had checked, even a bed and most of her clothes.

Well, he guessed that she didn’t have a reason to live somewhere else. She didn’t have a partner, or kids. And with how much she tended to work … living here just meant that she wouldn’t have to commute every day.

And that she wouldn’t have to even leave the building most of the time.

Alphys had always been … asocial, in a way. Even his version. He had been one of her closest friends, if not her _closest_ friend, so he had seen her more than anyone, but it still wasn’t uncommon for her to lock herself in her house for a while and just watch anime and work for a week or two. And now that he _wasn’t_ one of her closest friends, he knew that not seeing her for a while was par for the course.

But from how little he had seen her lately, it seemed like she was trying to become a hermit.

He had looked for her when he was at his Hotland station, every day for the past few months. But he hadn’t seen her. When he asked other people how she was doing, what was going on in her life, they just said they hadn’t seen her either. They all assumed she was busy with her new work, busy working on something that would help everyone. After all, if she could build a robot as incredible as Mettaton, a robot with artificial intelligence complex enough to become the underground’s most prominent celebrity, then certainly she could do what everyone else had failed to do before her.

And Sans had no doubt that Alphys was hard at work on some important project.

But that didn’t change how much it worried him that she wasn’t getting out.

She didn’t say anything as they rode the elevator down to the lower floors, and Sans tried not to notice how familiar the sound of the old gears were, even though he knew they weren’t the same old gears that had carried him into the lower labs for so many years. They hadn’t been used as often as the ones he remembered, because there weren’t as many people going up and down.

Because the people who would have gone up and down them had died long before he arrived.

The doors opened with a ding, and Alphys led him around the halls that he swore hadn’t been this dark the last time he was here. Maybe some of the lightbulbs had gone out and Alphys just hadn’t bothered to replace them. Her house had always been darker than most people’s, with blackout curtains on all the windows to allow her more privacy than she would normally be able to get in one of the busiest areas in the underground.

But at least the blackout curtains had been intentional. This looked more like neglect. Like Alphys just hadn’t had the energy to change the lightbulbs, or maybe hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice.

And even in the dim light, Sans could see that Alphys hadn’t been taking very good care of herself, either. It wasn’t particularly obvious, but Sans knew what a well-cared-for Alphys was supposed to look like, even if it was an entirely different Alphys than this one. And he knew that her skin was supposed to be a brighter yellow than this, her eyes whiter, her clothes and glasses cleaner.

She looked exhausted. Like she had in the months before she finished her PhD, locking herself in her house for days on end in a desperate rush to get her thesis done on time.

He gritted his teeth as they kept on walking.

“have you gotten a chance to meet up with those friends of yours?” he asked, in a sad attempt at sounding casual.

Alphys jumped and turned to him, blinking wide eyes behind her glasses.

“F-friends?”

“yeah, uh … bratty and catty?” he went on, the names coming back to him after a long moment. He had never known them in his universe. Maybe they hadn’t existed, or maybe Alphys had just never known them, because she spent so much time with him and his brother. “you grew up with them, right?”

She blinked again, then turned away, her cheeks faintly flushed. She cleared her throat.

“Uh … yeah, I … I’ve been busy, I … haven’t seen them in a while.”

“hm.”

A part of him wanted to tell her that she should try to meet up with them soon, even if it meant taking time off of work. Wanted to tell her that Asgore would understand, that she could afford a little time to herself, that if she let go of the life she had before, if she let go of the people who cared about her, that she might never get them back. That she would regret it later on.

But then Alphys would ask how he knew all of that would happen, and he would just have to shrug and say he was guessing rather than working from personal experience.

So he said nothing.

She was walking faster than her normal pace—or at least he thought she was. She looked even more nervous down here than she had in the main lab, and she kept jerking her head from side to side, like she was looking for something.

 _Checking_ for something.

Sans didn’t see anything, and apparently, neither did she. So they kept going.

They hadn’t been walking very long at all when they passed through an open area, right in the middle of the long hallway. Sans couldn’t remember what had been here before, or even if there had been a similar space in his own version of the lab. Maybe it had been the break area? He had never spent much time there, no matter how hard Dr. Japer tried to get him to rest. And his version would have been better lit, probably with tables and comfy chairs and the dorky posters Dr. Lemming loved to put up on any area they were allowed to decorate.

But there was none of that here. There was only one thing, one machine, jutting out of the shadows like something alive. Shaped like a face, with eyes and a mouth, horns and pincers.

Reaching out to swallow them whole.

That was … the S.E. extractor.

Except … no. No, that wasn’t it, it was … different. He didn’t know how, but it didn’t look quite the same as he remembered. Not that he had paid it all that much attention before—he had only worked with it briefly, when …

Well, he wasn’t keen to remember those days.

It looked very similar. Too similar to be a coincidence. And suddenly Sans thought back to the blueprints he had given Alphys without a thought, back in the early days when he was still trying to fix his first machine. They hadn’t been important, after all, and it wasn’t like he was going to do anything with him. They might as well go to the one person who might be able to do some good with them.

And she had used them, apparently. He didn’t know when—he hadn’t been to the lower parts of the lab in …

Had he ever been to the lower parts of this lab? Since the incident at the Core? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t think he had, though.

A small part of him wanted to ask her when she had built it— _why_ she had built it—but the rest of him shoved the idea aside.

This was her business. And he wasn’t sure they were close enough for him to get an honest answer.

He kept going, forcing back the urge to glance at the machine over his shoulder as he increased his pace to catch up with Alphys. If she had noticed his disappearance, she said nothing about it.

Finally, Alphys stopped and opened a door that creaked like the hinges hadn’t been oiled in a while. He wondered, briefly, whether she had even been in this room since she had brought his machine down here. He doubted that she had. She had insisted there were plenty of empty rooms to store his machine—she hardly needed the whole lab to herself, especially when she was just doing smaller tasks—and it didn’t have much room for anything else, anyway.

She stepped inside, and he followed, lingering in the doorway as she flipped on the light switch. The lightbulb flickered above their heads a few times before finally coming on, casting a shaky, dim light all around the room that somehow looked even creepier than the hallway.

But creepy or not, the light was enough for him to make out the single machine sitting against the back wall, covered with a layer of dust that must have been half an inch thick.

Sans felt the oddest combination of warmth and chill sweep through him as he stared at it. He could almost see himself standing in front of it, putting it together from spare parts he found around the dump, jotting down notes about its design as he remembered them, or just sitting on the floor of his cramped shed, staring at it and trying not to think about how pointless it all was.

How pointless it had turned out to be.

Alphys fidgeted again, and Sans jerked his attention away from the machine and back to her.

“Well, uh … h-here it is,” she said, averting her eyes and fidgeting even further. He couldn’t tell whether it was the machine she didn’t want to look at it, or him. Either way, he did his best to smile.

“thanks, alph—alphys,” he replied, barely catching himself in time. God, she looked familiar sometimes. “i’ll be good on my own now.”

Alphys looked up, something like panic flashing through her eyes, but she looked away again a second later. She fidgeted even more than before, and he could hear a faint anxious whine building in the back of her throat, though she never quite let it out. She swallowed a few times, glancing from side to side, then over Sans’s shoulder.

Out the door.

Before Sans could even think of turning around, she cleared her throat.

“Y-you … o-okay,” she managed, clearing her throat a little harder. “I’ll just … b-be in the next room. I’ll take you back up w-when you’re r-ready.”

She gave him a brief, shaky smile, but wouldn’t meet his eyes for more than a couple seconds at a time. Sans felt his own smile slip, closer to his permanent grin.

“i know the way,” he said, even though it should have been obvious. “you don’t need to just wait around for me, ‘m sure you’ve got work to do. i can go back up by myself.”

Alphys bit her lip. Not just that mindless chewing that she did almost half the time, but a firm, painful-looking bite as she clenched her hands and shifted her weight from foot to foot.

“N-no, I just … I …” She trailed off, biting her lip even harder as she seemed to think through her answer. She swallowed in a hard gulp before looking back up to him and giving him the single most unconvincing smile he had ever seen. “I’m … n-not that busy. I’ll j-just … t-t-take a break for a little while … just l-let me know when you’re d-done …”

Sans furrowed his browbone, but finally nodded, and watched as some of the tension in Alphys’s shoulders slipped away. Some. But not all.

She gave him a small, shaky smile, then turned around and left him alone. Her footsteps stopped at the next room over, and he heard a door opening and closing before everything was quiet.

Well. Maybe he should have expected that.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that they weren’t quite close enough for her trust to run as deep as he remembered. And this was her private lab, after all. He wasn’t sure exactly what she thought he was going to get into, but …

He shook his head and turned to the machine, starting the tedious process of brushing off the dust and getting it booted up again.

He hadn’t thought about the machine in years, and the idea hadn’t even come to him for more than a year after he got to this universe. He had been far too focused trying to settle into his new life, with a new home and a new job and a brother who didn’t know that they were virtually strangers. But he had had enough time after that to work on a variant of the T.F. machine, and even to make some improvements on the original design.

Occasionally he found himself wondering if Dr. Billington would be proud, if she saw what he had done from what he learned from her machine.

Then he decided he didn’t want to ask whether this world’s version of her had been in the Core when it exploded.

The improvements weren’t anything major. Well, not what he would have considered major, at least. It had still been Dr. Billington’s design, at the base. He had just found a way to get more details out of the readings, now that he knew what exactly the machine had been measuring. He could see the individual timelines a little more clearly now, and even go back and forth along them for a span of what might have been a few days and might have been a few months—it wasn’t like he could see enough detail to tell the difference.

That had seemed important back then. For a little while, at least. He had given up on the machine to take him home, but for some reason it had felt so essential to have a machine that would give him the same information as he had had when this whole mess started. And he had managed it. He had spent months on the thing, built it from memory and improved it from there. And then …

And then …

He had abandoned it.

Maybe he had finally accepted what he had been denying the whole time he was building it: that knowing what was going on with the timelines wasn’t going to do a goddamn thing if he couldn’t travel between them.

He had always been stubborn. It had always taken him a long time to accept things that couldn’t be changed.

But he _had_ accepted it. He had moved on. He had given up on the stuff that didn’t matter—the stuff he couldn’t fix—and focused on what he had left.

And now … now he was coming back.

Was that failing? Was that giving up on giving up?

Was that giving up on his new life?

On his brother?

No. No, this … this was different. There was a problem, there was something wrong, something he needed to fix. Or … or at least know about, even if he couldn’t fix it. If he knew what was going on, then he could at least avoid the problem properly. Hard to avoid something if you didn’t know what it was.

He nodded to himself, pushing back the inner voice that told him how unlikely it was that this machine would be of any help, and continued his work.

After several minutes of pushing buttons and making sure everything was plugged in—and kicking it a few times when it simply refused to work—the machine began a low, continuous hum, and the screen flickered to life, showing several dozen thin lines stretched from the top to the bottom.

They were thinner than the ones in his old machine. More precise. He twisted a knob below the screen, and the lines shrunk further, allowing more of them to show up around the edges, stretching further up and down. He pushed another button, and one of the lines turned bright red, stark and bright against the white and black of the rest of the screen.

Their timeline.

Just one out of thousands, if not millions, of others.

And somewhere in that mess of countless other lines was the world he had once called home.

Even if he would never be able to figure out which one it was.

He shook the thought from his head and focused, putting his hands on the controls and adjusting the screen, calling up the memories of when these readings had meant something to him, when they had seemed like something important. Something useful.

He still had a vague mental image of what the readings had looked like before, but it was just that: vague. And he hadn’t been keeping records. Of course he hadn’t: he hadn’t been in his right mind, and more than that, he hadn’t wanted to risk Alphys running into his readings and asking what they were for. He had been lucky enough to be allowed to use her resources, get her help finding spare parts, to get a place to store it when his shed lab got too cramped, without telling her what it was and what he was trying to do. He wasn’t going to push his luck any further.

But without a baseline, without anything to compare it against, he couldn’t exactly tell if anything was different. If anything was wrong.

If he wanted to know what was going on … if there was something wrong with the timeline itself and not just him being paranoid and projecting his own worries onto things that had been put to rest years ago …

He would have to keep checking.

He would have to see if anything changed.

He had never built a printing mechanism into the machine—never thought he would need one, and besides, printer ink wasn’t easy to come by—so he took his time staring at the readings, noting every detail and committing it to memory. He had spent enough time memorizing textbook passages before exams that he could hold it in his head for at least a little while. He could write it down when he got home, and the next time he came, he could bring paper.

Next time.

Because he would have to keep coming back here.

If he wanted to get a good baseline, he would have to come back here almost every day.

For a second, that old fear reared its fat ugly head, and Sans had to shove it back down before it could start making noise. Because it didn’t matter if he was afraid. It didn’t matter whether he wanted to do this. He wanted answers, and this was how to get them.

This was how he made sure Papyrus was safe. Or at least … that the world Papyrus lived in was safe.

The fear faded to the back of his mind, and he wrapped it up and tucked it in a corner and left it to its own devices. It wasn’t going to do him any good now.

He stared at the machine for a few more minutes, memorizing everything he could, before he finally shut it down and unplugged it from the wall. The room went dark, and Sans stood there for a second, making sure he cold still see all the little lines on the screen in his head. Then he turned around and started out of the room.

The second his foot was back in the hall, Alphys stumbled through the door just to the right, her eyes wide and panicked and her smile even shakier than before.

“R-ready to go?” she asked, and despite her obvious attempt at politeness, it sounded like every second that he remained in the lab was bringing her closer to implosion.

He paused, then smiled.

“yep.”

She nodded, smiling a little wider, a little more relieved. She closed the door behind her and scurried down the hall the way they had come, and with only a glance behind him, Sans followed behind her.

As they stepped into the elevator, he almost asked about coming back tomorrow, but when he looked to the side to find her hand shaking as she pressed one of the buttons, his voice died in his throat. He could ask later. Tomorrow morning, maybe. Maybe then, she wouldn’t be quite so stressed.

And in the meantime, he could always drop by the dump and see if any new anime had fallen down.

She might not be his lab partner—or his best friend—anymore, but whatever strain she was under, if there was one thing he knew about Alphys, it was that there was no problem anime couldn’t solve.


	11. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags.

He had done it ten times now.

At least ten times. He had lost count a while ago, and didn’t see the reason to try to keep track after that. He kept telling himself that he would stop, that this would be the last time, that he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

But he kept doing it. Over and over again.

Papyrus would ask him a question, and Flowey would answer, almost without thinking. Then Papyrus would ask another, and Flowey would answer that, and before he knew it he was chatting away about things he was worried about or things that had happened or even just old memories of him and Chara and by the time he realized what he was doing he had already blabbered out far more than he ever should.

And Papyrus always reacted the same way. Or … well … almost the same way. His words were different each time, just a little bit, just as what Flowey told him was always a little different. He always nodded in understanding. He always said that it was okay.

His reaction didn’t even change when Flowey started telling him the things he had done.

Now _that_ had definitely been an accident. Flowey wasn’t exactly keen to let anyone know what he was capable of, the little … experiments he had been doing when Papyrus wasn’t around. Saying mean things to people he had only been nice to before, just to see what they would do or say. Once he even told Papyrus how he had hurt someone, pushed them over so hard their HP dropped, because he had never pushed someone over before and a little voice in the back of his head wondered what it was like and the same little voice told him that it didn’t matter because he could just go back and undo it and they had been saying and doing the same thing for _so many runs …_

After the words left his mouth, he had flinched and looked up at Papyrus, ready to be told off for his actions, and … somehow looking forward to it. Because he had never seen Papyrus tell anyone off before, not really. He would grope about his brother’s laziness, Flowey had even seen him shout, but it wasn’t _really_ anger.

And Flowey wanted to know what that looked like.

But Papyrus didn’t tell him off.

He looked at him for a long, long time, apparently thinking very, very hard. The whole time, his eyes remained soft. Thoughtful. Almost _concerned._

Then he opened his mouth, and told Flowey that he knew he could do better.

That he knew he had done something not-good, and that now that he knew he had done something not-good, he could try his best not to do something not-good in the future. He could make better choices, and Papyrus would help him. And together, trying as hard as they could, Flowey would surely never make a not-good choice again.

And Flowey stared back, mouth hanging open, eyes as wide as they had ever been, before he finally managed to nod and change the subject.

He kept thinking about it for the rest of the day, and the day after that, Papyrus’s words running through his head on repeat, like a record player that played the same clip of music over and over again.

Because Papyrus believed that.

He believed that Flowey had simply made a mistake, and wanted to do better.

He assumed that Flowey felt bad about what he had done.

He assumed that Flowey _could_ feel bad about what he had done.

But even still … he knew Flowey had done something wrong, and he didn’t care. He didn’t treat him any differently. He talked to him like he had simply stepped on someone’s toe rather than intentionally hurt them, like he could go back to the straight and narrow whenever he liked.

Like he still had a conscience that would make him want to.

And a couple of days later, when that thought had run around Flowey’s head several hundred times … he found himself wondering how far he could go before Papyrus stopped believing in him.

After all, it was a lot easier to accept that someone had hurt another person in the past, someone you didn’t know, then to accept them hurting you. Right now. To accept pain you were dealt rather than just the fact that someone got hurt.

So … he tried to hurt Papyrus.

Not _really_ hurt him. Not at first, at least. He just … said not so nice things to him. Or maybe he was a little rougher with his attacks than he normally would have been. Papyrus was tough, and apparently Undyne’s training was tough, so it didn’t bother him to get hit in the face like it would other people. Besides, he always said, they were training, and the fact that Papyrus had _let_ himself get hit in the face was just proof that he needed to train harder.

The words obviously hurt more than the attacks.

Papyrus tried to hide it. Flowey could tell that he had spent a very, very long time hiding his emotions, and he was good at it, but Flowey had spent a lot of time reading people, and even if he had yet to figure out the mystery of Papyrus, he could at least get a sense that something wasn’t right. That his words had hit home just as hard as he intended, and some of them even harder.

He wanted to feel bad. He _tried_ to feel bad. But guilt didn’t come like it had before. Just the memory of it.

Still, he usually went back after he had said them. Part of him wanted to know what would happen if he kept going in a route where he hurt Papyrus … but another part of him didn’t want to risk having to build that whole relationship all over again. He had already gone back to nearly the beginning a few times, back when he wasn’t so smart about when to save. It was … tedious, doing things all over again, especially if he wanted the same outcome. Especially when it was something so subtle as a relationship he wanted to test out.

The thought had crossed his mind, once or twice, to go back and see what a run would be like if he was mean to Papyrus from the beginning, if he never befriended him, if he was just a mean little flower that said mean things and made his day worse.

He tried to tell himself that he would never do something like that. He was just doing little things, just … relatively harmless things. Even if he knew they weren’t harmless. Even if he could see the pain flash through Papyrus’s eyes when the words left his mouth, though the pain was gone a second later.

It was really hard to tell where the line was when Papyrus never told him he had crossed it.

Even when Flowey was mean on purpose, and there was no question he was being mean on purpose. Even when he spat out the worst insults he could come up with, Papyrus never got mad. He was always friendly. Always nice. Sometimes he would twist the insult into a compliment, and Flowey couldn’t tell whether or not he knew what he was doing. Sometimes he would pat Flowey on the head and suggest that he was having a cranky day.

Once, and only once, Papyrus told him that his language was rather rude, in his opinion, and that was when Flowey had finally decided to try out all the swear words he had never learned in his old life.

He _wanted_ Papyrus to be mad at him. He wanted him to tell him that he was wrong, that he was mean, that he was cruel, he wanted him to call him out for everything he was doing because As—Flowey _knew_ it was wrong even though he didn’t _feel_ and he just wanted someone to confirm it, to tell him what his memories assured him had to be true.

But Papyrus refused.

He just looked at him with sad, confused eyes, telling him that he could do better, if he recognized the insult at all. He _believed_ in Flowey. Told him he knew he was a good person. Told him that he could do better. So much better. He could do so much better if he just tried.

Every. Single. Time.

And it was getting harder and harder for Flowey to tell himself that he was doing the wrong thing when Papyrus refused to say it.

He had spent the entire morning thinking about it, running over the memories in his head and trying to decide what to do next. He had tried to sleep in, but flowers didn’t sleep the same way monsters did, so he ended up with hours with nothing to do but think. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do, after all. Papyrus had become his primary focus, even though they were only together a few hours per day. He really needed to find someone else to spend time with. Someone else to study. Just someone else to _watch_ who wasn’t related to that _stupid_ skeleton that seemed to have consumed his entire life.

“HELLO, FLOWEY!”

Speak of the devil.

Flowey wasn’t sure how long he had been there, or what time it was, when the voice called out and the boots crunched into the snow nearby. He thought they had set a meeting time, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Apparently Papyrus had, though, judging by his bright, eager smile and hand waving in the air, like he had been looking forward to this since they parted the day before.

But probably hadn’t been up all night thinking about it.

Flowey blinked a few times, shoving his thoughts to the back of his head. They bounced back in under a second, and he muffled them before they could show on his face.

“Oh, uh … howdy, Papyrus. How are you?”

Papyrus beamed, and Flowey felt something deep inside him cringe.

“I AM EXCELLENT! AND VERY EXCITED TO GET ON WITH OUR TRAINING!” he replied. But just as he opened his mouth to continue, he paused, and looked down at Flowey a little closer than before. He blinked. His mouth shut. He tilted his head to the side and let his mouth fall into a soft, worried frown. “UNLESS … YOU WOULD PREFER TO DO SOMETHING ELSE?”

Flowey bit back a wince and shook his head, avoiding Papyrus’s gaze.

“No, no, this … we said we were gonna train, so we’re gonna train,” he said, not very convincingly, at least to his own ears—or … whatever it was he used to hear now. “Besides, you need all the practice you can get if you wanna get into the Royal Guard, don’tcha?”

He made a sound that vaguely resembled a chuckle, turning his head up and smiling the best smile he could manage. It wasn’t very good, and he could tell in the first second that Papyrus hadn’t been fooled.

He didn’t respond at first. He gave Flowey one of the most thoughtful looks Flowey had ever seen on his face, somehow both soft and piercing all at once. He looked … sad. But not in the normal way Flowey would expect him to look sad.

“MY TRAINING IS INDEED VERY IMPORTANT,” Papyrus replied, before Flowey could figure out what his expression meant. “BUT MY FRIENDS ARE ALSO VERY IMPORTANT. AND IF MY FRIEND NEEDS ME TO DO SOMETHING ELSE IN ORDER TO NOT FEEL BAD … THEN I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, AM MORE THAN WILLING TO OBLIGE.”

He stood up a little straighter and smiled a little wider, though still notably more subdued than usual. Flowey bit the lip he didn’t have and tilted his head down toward the ground.

“… I’m fine, Papyrus.”

Papyrus’s eyes burned into him even without him having to look up to meet them.

“YOU DO NOT SEEM FINE, FLOWEY.”

“Well this isn’t about how I _seem,_ is it?” Flowey snapped, before he could stop himself. He jerked his head up and met Papyrus’s wide eyes, gritting his teeth and all but glaring up at the closest thing he had to a friend. “It’s about how I _am._ And I think I know that better than you do, so just … just …”

And just like that, the uncomfortable feeling bubbling up within him began to cool, and he breathed, standing there staring up at Papyrus and wondering how he had ever been angry at someone who only ever tried to be kind.

He should apologize. He shouldn’t have snapped at him, he shouldn’t be saying mean things, Papyrus had been so good to him even when he didn’t deserve it, Papyrus was a good friend and even if Flowey didn’t feel anything he should at least _try_ to be a good friend in return.

Even if … he couldn’t feel anything at all.

Even if he could hardly remember what it was like to feel anything now.

Even if …

“I KNOW YOU DO NOT HAVE ARMS, BUT I WOULD BE VERY HAPPY TO GIVE YOU A HUG REGARDLESS, FLOWEY,” Papyrus broke into his thoughts, drawing Flowey’s attention back up and to his face, his soft eyes, his gentle, hopeful smile. “IF YOU THINK IT WOULD HELP.”

Flowey didn’t respond. Apparently, Papyrus took this as agreement, because a few seconds later, he got down on his knees and scooted forward until he was right in front of Flowey. Then he bent over as far as he could and wrapped his arms around his stem in the most awkward attempt at a hug Flowey had ever felt.

Had anyone ever hugged him in this form before? Had Dad? Had Mom? They had touched him, sure, they had stroked his petals and cupped his face and told him everything would be alright, but they hadn’t … they had never …

He waited to feel something, some semblance of the warmth and comfort he had felt every time someone had hugged him before.

But he didn’t feel anything.

Nothing.

Just … empty.

Just …

 _Just_ …

Papyrus pulled back and stood up, now a few feet away once again, a wide smile on his face even as he rolled his arms to get rid of the apparent stiffness that came from crouching down so low.

“THERE WE GO,” he said with a satisfied nod. “THE GREAT PAPYRUS CAN FIND A SOLUTION TO ANY PROBLEM! DO YOU FEEL BETTER, FLOWEY? DID THE HUG HELP?”

Flowey shivered. He didn’t know where it came from, he wasn’t cold, he was used to Snowdin, he was used to the snow, it had never bothered him, but the shiver still ran through him, sharp and strong, and it was all he could do to avert his gaze before Papyrus could see the look in his eyes.

“No, Papyrus,” he murmured, so quietly he wasn’t even sure if he could hear it. “It didn’t help.”

Nothing helped. Nothing had ever helped and nothing _would_ ever help because he _didn’t feel anything anymore._

His mom couldn’t change that. His dad couldn’t change that. And Papyrus _definitely_ couldn’t change that.

It didn’t matter what he did, it didn’t matter how nice he was, how forgiving, how gentle and kind, it wasn’t going to change a _thing_ for Flowey no matter how hard he tried no matter how much he pushed it no matter how much Flowey wished it would make him feel _something_ …

“WELL, THEN, I WILL KEEP TRYING!”

Flowey’s head jolted up, and he blinked a few times as he looked up at Papyrus, now standing tall in front of him, a hand on his chest.

“I WILL NOT GIVE UP ON YOU, FLOWEY,” he went on, smiling down at him like there was nothing wrong in the world. “YOU ARE MY FRIEND, AND I WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.”

He was an idiot. He … he didn’t even know what he was talking about, he barely knew who Flowey _was,_ he _didn’t_ know who he was, not really, he didn’t know who he had been before, he didn’t know what he had done, he didn’t know all the things he didn’t, _couldn’t,_ feel.

“NO JOB IS TOO GREAT FOR THE GREAT PAPYRUS!”

Flowey had spent all this time with him because he was supposed to be different, but no one was different, not _that_ different, no one could change things for him, no one could change what he had become, no one could change what he had been _turned into._

“WE WILL WORK TOGETHER TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM!”

It didn’t matter how long he stayed entertained. It didn’t matter how interesting one person was. He would always get bored eventually. He would always feel empty again. He would never care about anyone, he would never get attached, he would never feel the love that had once been so important to him, he would never have the life that had been torn away from him, he—

“YOU WILL FEEL BETTER, FLOWEY, I PROMISE. YOU ARE MY FRIEND AND I CARE ABOUT YOU, AND I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL YOU—”

Flowey didn’t realize what he was doing until his vines were already in the air.

Papyrus saw them coming, in the casual way that he might look at a few bugs that happened to be flying toward his face. He wasn’t threatened. He wasn’t worried.

And he didn’t seem to realize how fast they were moving until they had wrapped around his throat.

He stiffened, just a little, though more out of surprise than fear. He looked at Flowey as the vines tightened, firmer and firmer and Flowey could feel his bones beginning to creak under the strain but Papyrus just stared at him with wide, baffled eyes.

“F-FLOWEY?” he asked, his voice strained. “WHAT …?”

He trailed off, and Flowey didn’t give him the chance to finish.

He felt a smile beginning to stretch across his mouth, wide and menacing.

And then, before he could even think, he twisted his vines, and snapped Papyrus’s head right off his neck.

The skull toppled off his sounds, falling into the snow just as the rest of his body crumbled into dust.

But the head was still there.

Eyes open. Wide.

Stunned.

Confused.

Staring at him, lost and unsure and the mouth was opening and Flowey could hear Papyrus’s voice beginning to come out of a throat that no longer existed and—

Flowey reset.

And Papyrus was sitting right next to him.

His head attached to his shoulders, blabbering away about his brother or Undyne or something else that Flowey didn’t care about, his gaze off in the distance, his hands moving excitedly as he told a story Flowey had heard on at least ten separate occasions.

Flowey forgot he had saved during their conversation the day before. He had been bored, and saved almost without thinking. And now it was only a day before he had …

He had …

Papyrus went quiet, and Flowey stiffened when his eyes fell on him again.

“FLOWEY?” he asked, and his voice was so different but somehow _exactly the same_ as before he had … it was the same voice, the same person, he had _killed_ the same person, not hurt, not injured, he had _killed_ him, he had been _dead_ but now he … “FLOWEY, YOU SEEM UPSET. IS EVERYTHING ALRIGHT?”

Flowey swallowed, as hard as he would have when he actually had a throat to swallow with, actually had a throat that could get clogged with emotion.

Because he didn’t have a throat, and it wasn’t clogged with emotion.

Because … he didn’t feel anything.

He had killed someone, and he didn’t feel _anything._

And that very fact should have made him feel something, but it didn’t.

Nothing at all.

“FLOWEY?”

Flowey jerked his head up again, blinking a few times as he met Papyrus’s eyes. Papyrus waited for him to respond, patient as ever. Flowey cleared a throat he didn’t have and forced a smile onto his face.

“Sorry, Papyrus,” he said, and his voice came out exactly the same as before. Like nothing had changed for him as well as anyone else. “Just got a little lost in my thoughts there. What were we doing?”

Papyrus frowned for a long moment, a deep furrow in the center of his browbone. Then he grinned and pushed himself to his feet.

“WE WERE ABOUT TO START OUR TRAINING SESSION, OF COURSE!”

And without another word, he ran off to his usual spot around fifteen feet away, standing tall and proud and ready to summon a bone at a second’s notice.

Just like he always was.

Just like he … always was.

Flowey had killed him, and he hadn’t changed a thing.

And even as Flowey summoned a few pellets and started launching them forward, keeping Papyrus’s attention focused on his attacks, he felt his mind drifting. Drifting to what Papyrus’s face had looked like before Flowey had snapped his neck, what his severed head had looked like, sitting in the snow.

How quickly he had fallen apart.

How many other ways Flowey could have killed him.

He had only done it once, after all. One way, out of who knows how many other ways. One situation, one relationship he had built up with Papyrus. He had seen one possible outcome.

And who knows how many more there were out there.

Even if he didn’t like the result, even if he regretted it … he could always go back. He could always reverse it. He could do it as many times as he wanted, as many times as it took him to get bored … and he could always go right back to how things had been before.

A bone whacked him in the face, and Flowey finally yanked his attention away from his thoughts and back to Papyrus, shouting out encouragement from across their makeshift battlefield.

Well, he could decide that later. After their training session. After he had spent a little more time seeing how things would go now.

After all, he had all the time in the world.

And all the chances he wanted to do it over again.


	12. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to say thanks so much to everyone who has read, commented on, left kudos for, or bookmarked this story. I really appreciate all your support. I lost inspiration for this fic some time ago, and have just been posting the chapters I have left. For now, it's going on indefinite hiatus.
> 
> If I do get inspiration to continue in the future, I'll definitely post the chapters as I finish them! For now, though, thank you again, and I hope you enjoy this chapter. :)

He had known that going to the lab might help solve his issues with feeling “off,” with worrying that the world around them was being messed with, and he knew very well that it wouldn’t do a bit of good for his worries about his brother.

Still. It would have been nice if he could have taken care of both at once.

It would have been nice if he could have taken care of his worries about his brother at all.

But the universe had never been so kind as to make things any easier for him. It was his job to take care of his problems himself.

Didn’t stop him from worrying, though.

Papyrus’s disappearances had become more and more frequent over the past few days. He wasn’t in any of his usual spots, and sometimes, when Sans wandered around looking for him, he even found that one of his puzzles had been left uncalibrated. Not that Sans hadn’t done the same thing on hundreds of occasions, but this was _Papyrus._ And his passion for keeping his puzzles calibrated was even greater than his passion for making inedible food.

He would always come back in the evenings, even if it was a little late. He would still eat dinner with Sans, watch a little TV, read a bedtime story, and go to sleep. He would still sleep just as little before waking up and cleaning the house and putting together something for breakfast that he felt confident Sans would eat—which was, almost invariably, either something pre-packaged, a frozen meal, or a bowl of cereal. Thankfully, Undyne hadn’t yet given him any tips on how to make cereal, so at least that turned out alright.

They would eat their cereal, and they would talk. Or rather, Sans would joke and Papyrus would grumble and it would be normal and comfortable and all Sans wanted.

Then Papyrus would leave.

And Sans wouldn’t see him again until a few minutes past their usual dinnertime.

A part of him said that he should be glad. Papyrus being late, being busy, meant that he had found something worth spending his time on. It meant that he wasn’t wandering around Snowdin, bored, like he usually did when Undyne was busy. It meant that he had a life, something he was excited about, something that was worth his time.

Sans just … didn’t know what that was.

And a tiny part of him wondered whether this was how Papyrus felt when he asked what Sans had been doing all day and Sans only gave him a tiny snippet of the truth.

After all, it wasn’t like Papyrus knew where Sans was all day. He hadn’t known before, and he definitely didn’t know now. He could still have caught him at one of his stations, or at the door to the Ruins, depending on the time of day. But for the past week, Sans had spent at least an hour every day at the lab, huddled over the machine in the basement, taking notes, examining the readings to see if anything had changed. Trying to get a good enough idea of what things were supposed to look like so he would know what it would look like if something changed.

He had never explicitly asked Alphys if he could come every day, but she never turned him away. She also never stopped following him into the basement. He had given her anime—three new DVDs, in fact, and a comic—and she had thanked him profusely, but every time he came back, he saw his gifts sitting on her desk, apparently untouched, not even filed away into the extensive collection he knew she kept on the upper floor.

It didn’t matter what he did, or what he said, or how often he came back to do the exact same thing. She refused to let him stay in the basement by himself, and as hard as he tried, it was getting difficult not to take it as an insult.

But she wasn’t watching over his shoulder, or poking into his research, and after all, it _was_ her lab now. She could have just as easily stopped him from coming at all. He tried to take that as a sign that she liked him, at least a little, even though she didn’t trust him like she once might have.

Besides, after all he had done, he probably didn’t deserve that level of trust anyway.

So he tried not to think about it, and he focused on his work. On the readings. On the slight shifts from the baseline, shifts that may or may not have been part of the baseline. He hadn’t been watching it for long enough to be sure, but … it still looked odd. If there was a way for readings he barely understood to look “odd.”

It looked like they were … jumping. That was the only word he could think of to describe it. One would seem to start tapering off, like the timeline was … weaker somehow, or it would split into two and one would be stronger than the other and sometimes they would meld back together and other times they would go in completely different directions, overlapping the others or striking out on their own. Occasionally one even looked like it had split into ten or more different strands.

Maybe that was normal. Maybe it had always been like that. After all, that was one aspect of multiverse theory, wasn’t it? That choices could split universes. Time travel split it, too, of course, but choices—big choices, at least—should be able to do the same. At least in theory. Very vague, unproven theory.

Maybe someone was just making choices. Important choices. Maybe this was how things had always been, and he was just being paranoid, he was just refusing to accept that things were alright.

Or maybe—

The clock struck four, and Sans almost fell off the couch when the door swung open only a second later.

He straightened himself up just enough to hide his reaction by the time Papyrus stepped inside, grinning wide and proud and comfortable and so, so normal, that Sans could already feel some of the tension in his chest begin to slip away.

“HELLO, SANS!”

Sans’s shoulders relaxed a little further, even as his eyes drifted to the clock to make sure that he hadn’t just lost track of time. “you’re home early,” he said, as casually as he could.

Papyrus shut the door behind him and hummed in agreement.

“YES, I AM GOING TO WORK ON A NEW PUZZLE DESIGN! THEN I AM GOING TO START PUTTING IT TOGETHER! UNDYNE SAYS IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KEEP UP MY PUZZLE-DESIGNING SKILLS IF I WANT TO GET INTO THE ROYAL GUARD!”

Sans settled into the cushions a little further, a bit more of his concern slipping away. That made sense. That was … normal. Almost painfully normal, at this point. It was the sort of thing Undyne was known to say, the sort of thing Papyrus would be all too eager to do.

He had forgotten how nice familiar could be.

“sounds good,” he said, and the hint of a smile on his mouth almost felt real.

Papyrus brushed off his gloves and dusted the snow from his sweater, then turned to Sans with a suspicious look on his face.

“SPEAKING OF KEEPING UP ONE’S SKILLS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HOME, SANS? AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE AT YOUR STATION?”

Sans smiled a little wider and shrugged. “just taking a little break.”

Papyrus groaned. It was a beautiful sound.

“YOU TAKE FAR TOO MANY BREAKS, BROTHER!” he almost whined, shaking his head and huffing. “IT IS ASTOUNDING THAT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN FIRED YET FOR YOUR NEGLIGENCE! WHAT IF A HUMAN COMES BY IN YOUR ABSENCE? IT WILL WALK RIGHT BY YOUR STATION!”

Sans lifted a lazy hand to wave him off.

“don’t worry, bro. i put up a sign and told it to wait there until i got back.”

“OH.” Papyrus paused, a thoughtful look on his face. Finally, he nodded to himself, apparently satisfied. “WELL, I SUPPOSE THAT IS ACCEPTABLE FOR THE MOMENT. BUT YOU STILL TAKE TOO MANY BREAKS!”

Sans shrugged. “probably do.”

“HMPH!” Papyrus huffed, but said nothing else about it.

“you have fun today?” Sans asked, just as Papyrus started to walk toward the stairs.

Papyrus stopped and beamed, and Sans felt something deep inside him relax, just a little.

“OH YES, I HAD A LOT OF FUN!”

He marched through the living room, toward the kitchen, probably to grab a snack.

“you’ve been busier lately,” Sans asked before he could step into the kitchen. “find more things to do?”

Papyrus turned around and smiled at him again. “YES, I HAVE!”

Sans did his best to sound casual, forcing his concern to the back of his head. “like what?”

“TALKING TO MY FRIEND!”

Well, that was … strangely worded, but at this point Sans didn’t even bother to question that aspect of it.

“i thought undyne was busy a lot,” he pointed out instead.

Papyrus frowned, vaguely irritated.

“NOT UNDYNE, MY OTHER FRIEND!”

Then the memory hit Sans like a sack of bricks. A sack of bricks covered in spikes.

Right. Papyrus had told him about that before.

Or … no. He had. Hadn’t he? Yes. Yes, he definitely had.

He paused for a moment, wracking his head for a way to ask what he wanted to ask without it sounding like he knew it would sound. Yes, Papyrus had definitely mentioned making a new friend. He just hadn’t talked about them in a while, and Sans hadn’t asked.

Now he really wished he had.

“which one?” he asked, finally, and to his credit, it sounded like it was what he was going to say all along.

Papyrus looked away. He looked … uncomfortable? Something like that. Sometimes he was the easiest person to read in the world, but at other times … at other times it was like Papyrus carried around a mask he could throw on his face without anyone noticing. Sans knew it was there. Maybe everyone knew it was there. But that didn’t help them see what was underneath it.

Then he smiled, like nothing was wrong, the mask twisting around his face as easily as if it was part of him.

“FLOWEY!”

Sans looked at Papyrus for what felt like a very long time. Then he blinked, very, very slowly.

“flowey?” he repeated, testing the name out in his own voice to see if it sounded any more familiar that way. It didn’t.

“YES, FLOWEY!” Papyrus replied. “MY FRIEND!”

Sans furrowed his browbone. He ran through every detail of his memory, every person he had met in all his years living in Snowdin. His memory wasn’t perfect, by any means, but he could at least recognize the names of people he had met before.

But he didn’t recognize that name. Not even a little.

Papyrus had said his friend had never met any other skeletons before, but …

“huh,” he said, as casually as he could manage. “is, uh … is flowey new around here?”

Papyrus opened his mouth, paused, then closed it again, apparently thinking.

“I DON’T KNOW,” he said after a long moment. “HE HASN’T MENTIONED.”

“hm.” Sans fidgeted a little now. Wouldn’t that have come up by now, if they had been talking for a while? “what’s he like?”

And then Papyrus beamed again, and it would have been easy, so damn easy, just to let himself look at that huge grin and believe that everything was alright.

“FLOWEY IS WONDERFUL! HE KNOWS A LOT OF THINGS AND HE’S VERY FUN AND HE KNOWS A LOT OF COOL TRICKS!”

There was nothing wrong with the words, or the way Papyrus said them. But Sans still found himself fidgeting again, his smile a little tighter than before.

“tricks?”

“YES!” Papyrus replied, smiling even wider. “LIKE POPPING UNDERGROUND AND POPPING BACK UP SOMEWHERE ELSE! I ASKED HIM TO TEACH ME HOW BUT HE SAID THAT HE CAN ONLY DO IT BECAUSE HE HAS ROOTS UNDERGROUND AND I COULDN’T GROW ROOTS AND IF I DID JOGGING WOULD BE VERY DIFFICULT!”

“so flowey has roots?” Sans asked, carefully, narrowing down the list of possible monster types in his head.

Papyrus gave him another vaguely exasperated look.

“OF COURSE HE DOES! HE’S A FLOWER!”

Sans found himself wondering what were the chances that there were parents cruel enough in the underground to give their child a name like that.

Then he paused.

And he thought.

He had never seen a flower monster before. Not once. He had never even heard of a flower monster before in his life. And sure, things might be different in this universe, but they had been here for six years now, and so far, he had run into all the same types of monsters here as back home. And he had run into monsters that were plant-like, sure. There were plenty of them.

But Papyrus knew the difference between monsters that looked like flowers and monsters that _were_ flowers. And if this was just a monster, Papyrus would have _said_ he was a monster.

But he didn’t say that.

He said Flowey was a flower.

And though life spans across different types of monsters differed tremendously … Sans had never heard of a monster being born and growing up that fast. If this Flowey was having complex conversations with his brother, he was at least in the middle of childhood.

But Sans had never seen him before.

And while Sans hadn’t seen _everyone_ in the underground … well, okay, maybe he had. At least once, in passing. And he was pretty sure he would remember a talking flower. At least, a flower that talked without just repeating what it had already been told.

The thought ran through his head so fast he almost missed it the first time, and even the second time, when he managed to catch it, he almost let it go right away. Because it was ridiculous. It was … far-fetched and random and he was grasping at strings, he knew he was, but he had to be sure, he …

“how long have you been talking to him?” he asked, before he could think better of it.

Papyrus tilted his head. “FIFTEEN DAYS AND TWO HOURS. WHY?”

It wasn’t like Sans had an exact day where things had started getting … weird. But he had an idea. The machine had given him a fairly good idea.

And that idea was enough to tell him that the issues had started almost three weeks ago.

Sans knew that most seemingly crazy coincidences were exactly that: coincidences. He knew that he was bound to notice patterns, including ones that weren’t really there. He knew that the chances that he was drawing connections when they weren’t any were extremely high.

But he also knew that if he hadn’t ignored a few coincidences in the past, if he had taken them seriously, investigated them, not brushed them off, that things might be a lot different right now.

He didn’t know what a flower could have to do with the readings from the machine, or the general sense of … offness Sans had noticed recently. But there were a lot of things that still didn’t make sense that had screwed up his whole life. Just because he didn’t understand it didn’t mean it couldn’t affect him.

Didn’t mean that it couldn’t screw everything up again, if he wasn’t careful.

Then again … if he poked into something that wasn’t really causing a problem, if he pried into his brother’s life when it wasn’t his business, if he screwed up what might be a real friendship, as strange as it sounded …

Then he would only be making it worse himself.

“SANS?”

Sans didn’t jump this time. He just looked up to find Papyrus standing at the base of the stairs, staring at him with wide, worried eyes. As he probably had been for a while, judging by the depth of the furrow in his brow.

“nothing, bro,” Sans replied at last, grinning as genuinely as he could, even if it was barely wider than his usual smile. “just wondering. you must be extra cool to meet someone i’ve never even heard of before.”

There it was again, that smile, and even if it was just for a few seconds, even if he knew he couldn’t push his thoughts away for good, Sans let himself bask in it. Let himself appreciate every second of seeing his brother genuinely happy.

“OF COURSE I AM! FLOWEY SAYS THAT I AM VERY TALENTED! BUT I THINK HE THINKS THAT I AM NOT DOING AS MUCH AS I COULD.”

And suddenly, it was much harder for Sans to keep the smile on his face.

“he said that?”

Papyrus’s own smile fell as he looked away.

“I THINK HE IS UPSET WHEN WE SPAR,” he said, quietly, as much to himself as to Sans. “BUT I AM NOT SURE WHY. HE SAYS I AM VERY STRONG! BUT … HE SEEMS VERY IRRITATED SOMETIMES.”

A shudder ran through Sans’s bones, though he stifled it before it could actually make them rattle. He forced a wider smile onto his face and shrugged, even as he wanted to march out the front door and strangle the first small, yellow thing he saw.

“well, maybe he’s got something _bugging_ him.”

Papyrus frowned.

“WHAT? WHAT DO—” He cut himself off, blinked, then groaned, stomping his foot hard against the floor. “SANS!!”

A tiny bit of the tension slipped from Sans’s bones as he watched his brother, so normal, everything so normal, his brother here and irritated and _safe_.

“hehe,” he breathed, almost genuinely. He paused, glanced away, then looked to Papyrus again. “i’d like to meet him sometime. flowey.”

If he looked very closely—which he always did, on a habit he had never seen fit to break—he swore he could see Papyrus flinch.

Then, less than a second later, he grinned, as wide and bright as ever.

“YES! THAT WOULD BE GREAT!”

That mask was still there. But underneath it, just poking out, Sans could make out a tiny bit of nervousness.

But he just kept smiling.

He wasn’t going to get anywhere if he asked all his questions at once.

Papyrus waited a second longer, as if he thought Sans might say something else, but finally, when Sans remained silent, he turned around and bounded up the stairs, just as he always had.

Or … just as he had for the past six years.

His memory was too dull for him to tell whether his footsteps had changed from before that.

A door opened and closed, and Papyrus disappeared into his room, leaving Sans alone on the first floor, staring after him, feeling somehow even more empty and confused than before.

After a minute, he forced himself to look away, peering around the living room instead, taking in the sights that had become the closest thing he had to home, and trying to appreciate them. _They_ hadn’t changed at all. When he really thought about it, there were a lot of things that hadn’t changed at all. The monsters around town were the same. Undyne was the same. Almost all of Papyrus’s day was the same.

Their home was the same. The home they had built together, the home that was a sorry mimic of the homes they had had in their own worlds, but even still, it was _their_ home. They had made it out of nothing, when they had nothing but each other. And they had stuck together, even when the world had tried to yank them apart.

They still had each other. Maybe Papyrus was acting weird and maybe Sans hardly understood him at all, but … he was still here. He was healthy and safe. He was _alive._

And that was more than Sans had once thought he would ever have again.

Maybe he _was_ being paranoid. Maybe he was worrying too much, trying to find problems to solve even when everything was fine. Maybe he was just bored and his mind was seeing things when there was nothing.

Maybe he had gotten so used to something being wrong that he didn’t know how to function when something wasn’t.

Still … he had already started this little … investigation, or experiment, or whatever the hell he was doing. He was on the way to getting answers, even if it might turn out that there was nothing wrong that he needed answers to. He might as well finish what he had started. And if it turned out to be a waste of time … well. It wasn’t like he hadn’t wasted plenty of time before.

If it turned out to be nothing … then maybe he would finally get some assurance to stop worrying. Maybe he would finally be able to settle down and forget the mess of his own past and enjoy the life he had now, enjoy his _brother_ —

“ARGH!”

Sans’s head snapped up, leaning toward the second story as the door to Papyrus’s bedroom swung open, slamming into the wall beside it.

“what is it, bro?” he called up, somewhere between amused and actually concerned.

Only a second after the words left his mouth, a tiny, fluffy white dog bounded down the stairs, holding an action figure firmly in its mouth. It nudged open the front door without even a glance to Sans and ran out onto the porch, just as Papyrus left his room, running after it.

He stopped at the front door, staring out into the snow outside, his mouth pressed into a tight, irritated line, his fists shaking at his sides. He stomped his foot and huffed again.

“THAT INFERNAL DOG GOT INTO MY ROOM AGAIN!”

Sans felt some of the tension in his shoulders slip away. Just a dog. Nothing dangerous, at least, even if it was annoying. Well. Annoying to Papyrus. Sans couldn’t help but feel his smile curl up a bit more at the corners as he watched Papyrus groan and stomp his foot a few more times.

“dog seems pretty fond of you,” Sans muttered, sinking back into the couch.

“WELL I AM NOT FOND OF IT!” Papyrus called back, turning around and slamming the door shut, then bringing his hands to his hips. “AND I DO NOT WANT IT TO BE FOND OF ME IF BEING FOND MEANS SNEAKING INTO MY ROOM AND STEALING MY THINGS!”

“did it steal anything this time?”

“… NO. BUT IT DID LAST TIME! AND I NEVER GOT MY BONE BACK!”

“can’t you just make more?”

“THAT’S NOT THE POINT!”

Rather than trying to explain the point—a futile effort if Sans had ever seen one—Papyrus just gave one more huff before stomping up the stairs and back into his room, shutting the door behind him.

Sans remained in his spot on the couch, but found his browbone furrowing as his thoughts drifted.

He had seen that dog a few times now. He couldn’t remember how often exactly, but hadn’t it gotten into Papyrus’s room a few times now? And the kitchen. And the garage, apparently.

It hadn’t bothered Sans at all. Sure, he had seen it, but it hadn’t bothered him. But Papyrus … it seemed particularly interested in bothering him. He didn’t know why. He knew some dogs preferred certain people over others, and sometimes there was no obvious reason behind it. But still, given that Papyrus didn’t seem to have shown this dog any special attention, Sans would have thought it would leave him alone, at least after a while.

It wasn’t in the Royal Guard, like the majority of the adult dogs that lived around Snowdin. Maybe it wasn’t an adult? It was hard to tell—it seemed … very intentional in its mischief, but it never talked. Not all dogs talked, or talked very often, but this one had only ever barked, and usually the only sound Sans heard from it was the pattering of its feet against the floor or the snow.

And when he had asked the other people in Snowdin about it, none of them knew who it was. They had seen it running around, but it had never bothered them. None of them knew its name, or where it had come from, or long it had been there. It was just a simple white dog.

A simple white dog that had taken a special interest in his brother.

Sans tensed up again, just a bit. A flower, and a dog. A flower and a dog with no apparent origin, and no obvious interest in anyone … but Papyrus.

If the flower had something to do with this mess … then what if the dog …?

Sans shook his head and tried to brush it off.

One thing at a time. The flower first. The flower, and the machine readings.

Besides, unlike talking flowers, there were plenty of dogs running around Snowdin. Plenty of dogs who weren’t very well-known. Plenty of dogs that didn’t talk. Plenty of dogs that weren’t in the Guard.

So what if one had taken a liking to his brother?


End file.
